Transforming Family and State: Women’s Vision for Universal Childcare, 1966-1971
Deborah Dinner, Ph.D. Candidate
History Department, Yale University
In February 1962, Sarah Black Smith wrote a letter to journalist Betty Friedan responding
in a tone of mixed ambivalence and confidence to Friedan’s recent article in the Ladies Home
Journal entitled “Housewife is Not a Profession.” Smith wrote: “At first I was torn between
professional illustrating, good salary and my home with its chores and joys.” Unable to
reconcile her identity as a mother and a professional artist, however, Smith embraced the former:
“Both are work, one to further the well being of my family, the other to further my special
skill… I like working for the people I love best, my children and husband.” In concluding her
letter, Smith acknowledged but subordinated her grievances: “Would I trade my life as a wife
and mother just because I hate dish washing and loathe house cleaning?… No indeed.” Smith
characterized her decision as more than a personal choice between competing life options; her
role as a mother within a traditional family also defined her relationship to the state: “I like being
a mother every time grocery boy rushes to my aid helping me carry the bags as I lead my little
future American by the hand.”1
Within less than a decade after Smith wrote to Friedan, women’s intensifying struggle for
universal childcare held potential to restructure the relations among motherhood, paid work, and
women’s citizenship. Women of various classes, races, and political perspectives shared the
experience of motherhood, and facing dilemmas similar to the one Smith confronted, struggled
to reconcile childrearing with their pursuits of employment, political engagement, and leisure.
One working single mother’s petition to her Congresswoman, testifying to a “desperate need for
1
Letter from Sarah Black Smith to Betty Friedan, February 7, 1962, folder 460, box 13, Betty Friedan Papers,
Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
day care schools,” represented women’s turn to the state for assistance with the burden of
childrearing.2 Instigated by the second wave feminist movement, working and middle-class
women together extrapolated from overlapping social and material needs to articulate a right to
universal childcare.3 They advanced a collective political solution to a problem previously
experienced as “the unique responsibility of each individual woman,” challenging the boundaries
between the “domestic,” the “economic,” and the “political.”4
Activists insisted that to help women achieve civic equality the federal government had
to provide universal childcare. Identifying the forced choice between marriage and motherhood,
on one hand, and paid employment and careers, on the other, as the central barrier to women’s
equality, the National Organization for Women’s (NOW) 1966 Statement of Purpose advocated
“a nationwide network of child-care centers.”5 The National Black Feminist Organization,
which formed to address the needs of black women and to lend its political weight to the broader
women’s movement, worked for childcare to improve “the social, political, and economic
situation of the Black woman.”6 Different groups of women expressed multiple rationales why
2
Letter from Carol Schoenwolf to Bella Abzug, February 16, 1971, folder: Child Care Correspondence 1970-1971,
box 138, Bella Abzug Papers, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University.
3
Second wave feminism refers to the women’s movement in the 1960s, distinguishing this period from the
movement for women’s rights that emerged in the nineteenth century and culminated in 1920 with the passage of the
Nineteenth Amendment extending suffrage to women. The term does not refer to one specific set of ideas or actors
but rather to a shared social experience among American women that encompassed a range of ideologies, activism,
and cultural expression. Flora Davis, Moving the Mountain: The Women’s Movement in America Since 1960 (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 10-11.
4
National Organization for Women, “Statement of Purpose,” in Feminist Chronicles, 1953-1993, by Toni Carabillo,
Judith Meuli, and June Bundy Csida (Los Angeles: Women’s Graphics, 1993), 162. Mobilization around needs
challenges the rhetorical boundaries between spheres, creates new political discourses, and serves as a constitutive
moment in the formation of social movements. Nancy Fraser, “Talking about Needs: Interpretive Contests as
Political Conflicts in Welfare State Societies,” Ethics 99 (January 1989), 303.
5
“Statement of Purpose,” 162.
6
The media incorrectly characterized feminism as the “exclusive property of so called ‘white middle class’ women”
and, consequently, the women’s movement was “unfortunately not seen as the serious political and economic
revolutionary force that it is.” By ensuring the representation of black women’s concerns, the National Black
Feminist Organization (NBFO) would help to legitimate the revolutionary character of the women’s movement.
“Statement of National Black Feminist Organization,” in “National Black Feminist Organization” file, Schlesinger
Library, Harvard University.
2
government-funded but community-controlled childcare would help to equalize the sexes. They
contended that childcare would reduce women’s economic dependence on men, liberate women
from confinement to the home, aid in children’s cognitive and ethical development, and
empower parents to make childcare an element of progressive social change. Across multiple
ideologies and innumerable organizations, women constructed a new understanding of their
citizenship. Whereas Sarah Black Smith had defined her relationship to the state through her
private role as a mother, feminist activists leveraged their need for childcare as an issue of
considerable public debate and called for government’s intervention in the domestic realm.
While child care was constantly on women’s minds, efforts to make childcare a
collective, public responsibility remain an understudied aspect of second wave feminism. Most
overviews of the women’s movement in the sixties and seventies devote only a few pages to
feminist efforts to establish alternative childcare arrangements.7 Histories of child and familyoriented politics pay far greater attention to the key actors and major debates shaping legislative
change, than to how government policy intersected with the history of gender roles and women’s
social movements.8
The NBFO included childcare in its platform. “Points Taken from the Platform of the National Black Feminist
Organization,” in “National Black Feminist Organization” file, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
7
Davis, Moving the Mountain, 278-86; Alice Echols, Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 223, 226-27, 237, 379-80; Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The
Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement & the New Left (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 217,
222, 225, 231; Jo Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation: A Case Study of an Emerging Social Movement and
its Relation to the Policy Process (New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1975), 160-61, 202, 206-07, 242;
Susan Hartmann, From Margin to Mainstream: American Women and Politics since 1960 (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1989), 37, 65, 76-77, 83, 88, 102; Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s
Movement Changed America (New York: Viking, 2000), 79, 90-91, 208; Lauri Umansky, Motherhood Reconceived:
Feminism and the Legacies of the Sixties (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 46-51.
8
Historians Mary Frances Berry and Sonya Michel trace the constituencies backing various childcare bills, their
movement through Congress, and the major reasons behind their success or defeat. Mary Frances Berry, The
Politics of Parenthood: Child Care, Women’s Rights, and the Myth of the Good Mother (New York: Viking, 1993),
chap. 6; Sonya Michel, Children’s Interests / Mothers’ Rights: The Shaping of America’s Child Care Policy (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), chap. 7.
3
The issue of childcare receives little examination, in part, because it straddles a divide
scholars have drawn to separate feminisms. Writing as a participant observer in 1975, Jo
Freeman described “two distinct origins [of the women’s movement], representing two different
strata of society, with two different styles, orientations, values, and forms of organization.”
Galvanized by the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, the publication of The
Feminine Mystique, and the sex provision of Title VII, older women with experience in the use
of the media, lobbying, and electoral mobilization, established formal nation-wide organizations.
Meanwhile, younger women skilled in community activism grew dissatisfied with the sexism
prevalent in the civil rights movement and New Left organizations and created informal, local
women’s liberation groups. These groups provided an arena for political education and
grassroots mobilization of women, but their lack of structure led to fragmentation and prevented
the channeling of feminist activity into coordinated public service or political projects. 9
Subsequent scholarship on the social history of the women’s movement reinforced Freeman’s
schematic by portraying liberal feminism as limited to the pursuit of a sex-blind conception of
individual equality, and by crediting radical women with a powerful social critique of patriarchy,
but rarely attributing to them a coherent legislative agenda.10
The history of women’s struggle for universal, government-funded childcare recovers a
convergence between allegedly “liberal,” legal feminism and the “radical” critique of male
Freeman, Politics of Women’s Liberation, 49-62, 75-81, 142-46.
In her popular account of the women’s movement, The World Split Open (63-140), Ruth Rosen distinguishes
between the older generation of women who challenged traditional liberalism and the younger generation who
formed the women’s liberation movement after their exodus from the Left. Though a pathbreaking work, Sara
Evan’s Personal Politics focuses on the origins of women’s liberation in the civil rights movement and New Left
without discussing the influence of older feminists, such as Betty Friedan, on younger women. In the introduction
of her remarkable book, Alice Echols writes that radical feminists rejected the “liberal feminist solution of
integrating women into the public sphere.” Daring to Be Bad, 3. But Echols’ footnote cites a critique dated to 1982.
Her distinction between liberal and radical feminism thus derives, in large part, from a perception of what liberal
feminism had become by the eighties, rather than from a historical understanding of the earlier overlap among
feminists of various ideological stripes.
9
10
4
supremacy. The fight for childcare legislation does fits neither caricature. To advance the
childcare cause, radical feminists had to engage in party-politics, belying the view that these
women stood determinedly outside the political mainstream. Liberal feminists, for their part,
could not respond to women’s need for childcare with a politics founded on a strictly sex-blind
conception of equality. In contrast to prohibitions against sex-based discrimination in
employment and in state laws, universal childcare would affect not only the public realm but also
the private sphere traditionally understood as beyond the purview of government intervention.11
Liberal and radical feminists may have employed varying organizing styles and strategic tactics
but the distinction between them should not be overemphasized to the point that it blinds
historians to their overlapping goals. The struggle for universal childcare illustrates a shared,
transformative vision for change that drew on both radicals’ social critique and liberals’
legislative tactics.
11
Modern feminism emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, characterized by a tension between the goal of
equality of opportunity in the public sphere and the desire to maintain an emphasis on women’s needs and
differences vis à vis men. Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1987), 276-79, 283. In the 1960s, as Congress began to legislate on behalf of women’s equality in the public arena,
the limitations of sex-blindness in achieving the aims of women’s liberation became clear. The Equal Pay Act of
1963 mandated that employers pay male and female employees, performing equal work under similar conditions,
equally. Although the Act catalyzed an increase in women’s wages, in neglecting to provide equal pay for
comparable work, it failed to address pay differentials stemming from job segregation. Title VII of the Civil Rights
Act of 1964 addressed women’s work opportunities by prohibiting employment discrimination on the basis of sex,
as well as race, color, religion, and national origin. But even this measure could not redress the social norm holding
women responsible for childrearing and men responsible for wage-earning. Harrison, On Account of Sex, 98-105,
176-82.
In litigating before the Supreme Court during the 1970s, feminist organizations leveraged these pieces of
legislation to construct a constitutional doctrine of sex equality under the Fourteenth Amendment. Frontiero v.
Richardson, 411 U.S. 677 (1973), afforded heightened scrutiny to sex-based classifications. Although undeniably
important to the advancement of women’s status under the law, Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence did not
always reach women’s oppression, especially that experienced in the private realm. For example, the Court held
that differential drinking ages constituted sex discrimination but that discrimination against pregnant women did not.
Craig v. Boren, 429 U.S. 190 (1976); Geduldig v. Aiello, 417 U.S. 484 (1974). For a historical account of how
nineteenth-century law constructed women’s disabilities within marriage as “private” and thus impervious to
intervention, as well as related limitations of contemporary equal protection doctrine, see Reva Siegel, “Why Equal
Protection No Longer Protects: The Evolving Forms of Status-Enforcing State Action,” Stanford Law Review 49
(May 1997): 1116-19, 1135-46.
5
Daycare engaged powerful constituencies beyond the women’s movement, and the
weight of convergent interests helped feminists to leverage childcare in the political arena. Child
development scholars, politicians interested in poverty reduction and welfare reform, and
corporations all organized around childcare at the national level.12 These groups, however,
neither articulated the same rationales nor imagined the same types of services as feminists did.
As national childcare legislation became a real possibility, the challenge for feminists would
come in assembling the political power necessary to realize their particular vision.
From Sarah Smith’s letter in 1962, through the feminist movement’s crescendo during
the late 1960s, to the middle of Richard Nixon’s presidency, women’s thinking about childcare
and their political lobbying evolved. In 1971, an alliance of twenty-three groups ranging from
N.O.W., to the National Welfare Rights Organization, to churches, to child development scholars
formed the Ad Hoc Coalition on Child Development. The Coalition’s grassroots activism and
lobbying persuaded Congress to pass the Comprehensive Child Development Act (CCDA) of
1971. The Act allocated $2.1 billion to fund the construction and operation of daycare facilities,
provide training for personnel, and offer educational, nutritional, and health services.13 The
CCDA intended to offer free services for children whose family income was “below the lower
budget for a four person urban family” and to provide services on a sliding-fee scale to families
with incomes higher than these levels.14 In September 1971, the House of Representatives
narrowly included the CCDA, by a vote of 186 to 183, as part of a bill extending the federal
Office of Economic Opportunity anti-poverty program. After critics fought to constrain the
breadth of the childcare bill, a diluted version offering free service to fewer families passed the
12
Berry, Politics of Parenthood, 132-37.
House of Representatives Conference Report No. 92-682, Economic Opportunity Amendments of 1971, 92d Cong,
1st sess., 6.
14
The lower-budget for a four-person urban family was $6,900 annually. Ibid., 21-22.
13
6
House by a final vote of 251 to 115, with eighty-one Republicans joining the majority of
Democrats in favor.15 Congress forwarded the bill, which easily passed the Senate 117 to 63, to
President Nixon in early December.16
Along the way, however, the CCDA generated enormous opposition as a threat to the
traditional family and as an alleged step toward Communism. On December 10 President Nixon
vetoed the CCDA, with a vehement message that played to the rightwing of the Republican
party.17 Employing Cold War rhetoric, Nixon characterized “the most radical piece of legislation
to emerge from the Ninety-Second Congress” as “a long leap into the dark for the United States
Government and the American people.”18
Although the CCDA compromised feminist principles—it did not provide free childcare
to people of all income levels and included fewer provisions for community control than many
had wished—it was also the first and last viable universal childcare initiative in U.S. history.
Subsequent to the CCDA’s defeat, the national government has granted childcare only for the
poor. Advocacy organizations have followed suit by campaigning within this narrow
paradigm.19 Today, childcare activists have largely jettisoned the feminist dimensions of
childcare: they frame the issue in terms of children’s needs rather than women’s rights. Thus,
contemporary political dialogue about childcare has lost the feminist dimension central to the
second wave’s proposal for universal childcare.
Marjorie Hunter, “Day Care Service for All is Voted; But House Bill Limits Free Program to Poor—Others Pay
According to Means,” New York Times, 1 October 1971, 1. “Nixon Must Veto Child Control Law,” Human Events
31:41, 9 October 1971, 1.
16
“Child Care Veto,” Time 198, 20 December 1971, 8.
17
Berry, Politics of Parenthood, 138-39; Davis, Moving the Mountain, 285-86; Michel, Children’s Interests /
Mothers’ Rights, 236-80.
18
Richard Nixon, “Veto of the Economic Opportunity Amendments of 1971,” December 10, 1971, in Public Papers
of the Presidents of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and
Records Service, 1971), 1177.
19
Michel, Children’s Interests / Mothers’ Rights, 278.
15
7
I. FROM THE NEEDS OF WOMEN WORKERS TO WOMEN’S RIGHT TO WORK
Since the emergence of the modern welfare state during the Progressive Era, social
welfare policy had vacillated between supporting women as mothers or workers, yet it rarely saw
them as both.20 During World War II, the Lanham Act temporarily stilled this oscillation,
investing six million federal dollars in the expansion of New Deal era nursery schools.21 The
Act established an important legislative precedent, providing a basis for continued activism
through the 1950s even after the initial funding stream had ended.22 In 1960, two events—the
White House Conference on Children and Youth held in late March and early April, and the
National Conference on the Day Care of Children held in November—again placed daycare on
the national agenda. The 1960 conferences legitimated the contention of reformers in the
National Committee on the Day Care of Children, the federal Women’s Bureau, and the federal
Children’s Bureau that government should support women in their simultaneous roles as mothers
and workers. Advocates nonetheless based their rationales for childcare on children’s needs and
During the Progressive Era, “progressive maternalist” reformers leveraged a cultural and political rhetoric of
motherhood, through the federal Children’s Bureau, to advance social welfare causes. The Bureau’s founders, Julia
Lathrop and Grace Abott, and its first cohort of officials had extensive social reform experience as participants in the
settlement house movement. The Bureau combated infant mortality, agitated for improved health and social welfare
services in poor communities, and fought for laws and a constitutional amendment that would prohibit child labor.
The Sheppard-Towner Act, which provided federal matching grants to the states for maternal and infant health
services, represented the Bureau’s greatest achievement. The Act’s repeal in 1929 marked the return of children’s
welfare from the arena of public concern and action to the realm of individual mothers’ responsibility. Molly LaddTaylor, Mother Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994),
74-103, 167-96.
During World War II, while the Children’s Bureau remained committed to women’s role in the home,
while the Women’s Bureau and Works Progress Administration began to support maternal employment. A 1941
conference entitled “Day Care of Children of Working Mothers” achieved a tentative compromise between
proposals for foster care and emergency housekeeping aides, in the isolated cases where mothers failed to care for
their children, and proposals for childcare centers. Contentious exchange resulted in a waffling ten-point program
asserting both that women performed a vital patriotic service by remaining at home and that government had a
responsibility to provide care for the children of working mothers. Michel, Children’s Interests / Mothers’ Rights,
128-33.
21
Ibid., 134-35.
22
Ibid., chap. 5.
20
8
the importance of strengthening nuclear families.23 Second wave feminism would alter childcare
discourse to emphasize women’s rights.
A. Producers, Consumers, and Citizens: The Material Basis of Women’s Claims
Women’s need for childcare accelerated alongside an increase in maternal employment
from the post-war period through the 1960s. Growth in maternal employment during the
postwar decades had far outstripped the rise in women’s overall workforce participation: the
latter had doubled while the former had increased eight-fold.24 In March 1971, forty-seven
percent of black women and twenty-nine percent of white women with children under age six
worked. The significant proportion of mothers with young children in the labor force amounted
to a sizeable and growing constituency in need of childcare. Even greater percentages of women
with children aged six to seventeen worked: sixty-one percent of black women and fifty-one
percent of white women.25
These trends would only accelerate: during the 1970s the twin peaks
and deep valley that had long characterized women’s employment patterns began to flatten as
mothers increasingly stayed in the workforce.26
Inflation during the early seventies intensified women’s desire to hold onto their jobs.
Few women could rely on the salaries of male partners, the real values of which could not keep
Michel, Children’s Interests / Mothers’ Rights, 219-29.
These rates of increase refer to the period between World War II and 1969 but can legitimately be extrapolated to
the period between World War II and March of 1971. U.S. Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau, prepared by
Beatrice Rosenberg under the supervision of Pearl G. Spindler, Chief, Division of Legislation and Standards, “Day
Care Facts,” folder: Day Care – US Government Programs, box 143, Bella Abzug Papers, Rare Book & Manuscript
Library, Columbia University.
25
In total, 1.7 million black and other minority mothers and 10.4 million white women worked. The 1.7 million
statistic is cited directly in the Employment Standards Administration pamphlet. I have derived the 10.4 million
statistic from the fact, reported in the pamphlet, that minority mothers accounted for fourteen percent of all working
mothers. U.S. Department of Labor, Employment Standards Administration, “Fact on Women Workers of Minority
Races,” folder 14, box 198, Gloria Steinem Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College.
26
Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1982), 312.
23
24
9
pace with the rising cost of living.27 Betty Friedan’s proposal for an Economic Think Tank for
Women discussed not only “[t]he anxiety and anger of American women as consumers in the
current inflation” but also their “special problems as producers.” High unemployment rates
made women workers especially vulnerable to seniority-based layoffs, to employers’ preferences
for male workers, and to the public’s ongoing belief in the family wage:28 “[J]ust emerging from
the bottom of the economic pyramid in this country,” women “now face the prospect… [of
being] the last hired, the first to be fired.”29 “And yet,” Friedan queried, “can the thirty-five
million women in the labor force today ever go back home again?”30
Despite the evident and deepening need for childcare, the federal government’s reluctant
response meant that women continued to confront sorely inadequate options. The 1954 revision
of the income tax code provided a capped deduction for childcare expenses to working mothers,
widows and widowers, and divorced persons, but did not address problems of childcare supply
and quality.31 The federal government limited direct funding of daycare to the children of
women receiving welfare payments or likely to require public assistance. Under the Aid to
Families with Dependent Children program—Title IVA of the Social Security Act—the federal
government provided 75% matching funds to states for childcare services to low-income
employed mothers or mothers receiving welfare and participating in the Work Incentive
27
In the period 1970-1979, the Consumer Price Index rose by 83% from 121.3 to 217.4, compared to a 24%
increase in the period from 1960-1969 (with the base period of 1967 given the value 100). Department of Labor,
Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, 1967=100, Unadjusted,” available
from http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/surveymost?bls; Internet; accessed 20 October 2003.
28
During the first decades of the twentieth century, employers, economists, and social reformers justified lesser
wages for female industrial workers on the presumption that women received support from men on whom they were
dependent. Men, in turn, deserved a wage that enabled him to purchase not only a decent standard of living for
themselves but also the companionship of wives and decent lives for their children. During the Depression and New
Deal, female and male workers alike conceived of jobs as a scarce public resource that should be distributed
according to family rather than individual need. Alice Kessler-Harris, A Woman’s Wage: Historical Meanings &
Social Consequences (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1990), 6-15, 76, 79.
29
Betty Friedan, “Proposal for an Economic Think Tank for Women,” 1, folder 1400, box 40, Betty Friedan Papers,
Schlesinger Library, Harvard University. Friedan helped to establish the Think Tank in 1974.
30
Ibid., 2.
31
Michel, Children’s Interests / Mothers’ Rights, 203-11.
10
Program. In addition, child welfare grants made to the states under Title IVB could include
childcare services. In 1970, the federal government spent approximately $170 million for
childcare services, serving 450,000 children. Another $324 million in federal funding for
Headstart under the Economic Opportunity Act, provided health, nutrition, educational, and
social services for poor children.32
The children served by federal programs, however, represented only a small percentage
of the families in need of childcare services. A statistical survey by the Children’s and Women’s
Bureaus in 1965 revealed that of children under age six whose mothers worked full time, only
eight percent attended group daycare centers. Another forty-seven percent received care at
home, thirty-seven percent in someone else’s home, and the remainder partook in non-specified
arrangements.33 In 1971, Newsweek reported that of the 4.6 million working mothers with
children under six there existed only 640,000 licensed day care spaces.34 A progressive
education journal reported that in 1967, nearly one million children under the age of fourteen—
40,000 of them less than six years old—stayed at home alone while their mothers worked.35
Congresswomen Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug consistently advocated on behalf of
working women facing inflationary pressures and a formidable lack of childcare. After
graduating from Brooklyn College in 1946, Chisholm served for seven years as a nursery school
teacher and director, during which period she also gained a masters in early childhood education
from Columbia University. In 1964, Chisholm overcame a district political machine in Brooklyn
to gain a seat in the New York State Assembly. Four years later, a Supreme Court decision
forced the New York Legislature to redraw district lines, resulting in Brooklyn’s predominantly
32
Committee on Finance, United States Senate, Child Care Data and Materials, 92nd Cong., 1st sess., 1971,
Committee Print, 6-9.
33
Ibid., 3. The category of “someone else’s home” may have included group home-based childcare, which served as
one model for commercial daycare outside the home.
34
“Day Care: What’s a Mother to Do?” Newsweek 78 (July 5, 1971): 61.
35
“Day Care Centers – A National Priority,” Edcentric 3, no. 4 (May 1971): 27.
11
black twelfth district. Chisholm ran for office and became the first black woman elected to
Congress. At first placed by House leaders on the Agriculture Committee because of its
jurisdiction over food stamps, Chisholm insisted that her assignment prevented her from best
serving her constituency. In 1971 she secured a position on the Education and Labor Committee,
where she worked to expand minimum wage legislation and to increase federal support for
daycare.36
Abzug acted as a bridge activist, connecting Old Left causes with sixties social
movements and grassroots mobilization with Congressional politics.37 After receiving her J.D.
from Columbia University in 1945, she opened her own firm specializing in civil rights and labor
law.38 An activist lawyer and founding member and Washington lobbyist for Women’s Strike
for Peace, in 1970 Abzug successfully challenged the Democratic incumbent to win a
Congressional seat representing New York City’s nineteenth district. In addition to her antiVietnam War activism, Abzug made women’s issues a primary concern of her tenure in
Congress.39
Abzug’s constituents wrote to her in support of the Comprehensive Child Development
Act, emphasizing the bill’s material consequences. One mother with two pre-schoolers referred
to the exorbitant cost of private daycare, explaining that her $150 monthly childcare expenses
36
Alan Ehrenhalt, ed., Politics in America: Members of Congress in Washington and At Home (Washington, D.C.:
Congressional Quarterly Press, 1981), 827-28.
37
Bella Abzug belonged to the generation of “bridge” women activists described in Susan Lynn, “Gender and
Progressive Politics: A Bridge to Social Activism of the 1960s,” in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in
Postwar America, 1945-1960, ed. Joanne Meyerowitz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 103-27.
Though older than many women’s liberationists and evincing a concern for labor rights and social welfare
reminiscent of the pre-war Left, Abzug’s involvement in the antiwar and women’s liberation movements during the
1960s, and as a Congresswoman from 1971-1976, provides evidence for Lynn’s thesis that women activists of her
generation linked prewar Progressive reform with sixties social movements.
38
Finding Aid prepared by Mary Boone Bowling, January 2002, Bella Abzug Papers, Rare Book & Manuscript
Library, Columbia University.
39
Abzug’s first Congressional action was to propose the United States’ withdrawal from Vietnam within six months.
Hartmann, From Margin to Mainstream, 42-43.
12
swallowed a large portion of her $110 weekly salary as a secretary.40 Another woman exhorted
Abzug: “Day care is needed for those in my position not just public assistance & welfare
mothers. Please help us fight our case.”41 Working-class women endured constant, draining
labor both inside and outside of the home: “We work in factories. We work hard, and we go
home from the shop and make dinner, clean house, and take care of our kids.” Coupled with the
lack of affordable childcare, women’s work strained their families: “Since there are no child-care
places, if we have young kids we have to work a different shift from our husbands; so we never
get to see our husbands except on weekends, and that makes for lots of tension.”42 Burdened by
multiple responsibilities, working women regarded childcare as a means to stability within the
family, personal happiness, and financial security.
Women’s liberation as well as the dollars and cents of daily life shaped the childcare
debate. By the time the CCDA reached the Congressional floor and even in the wake of its
defeat, childcare activists stressed both women’s and children’s rights. One of Abzug’s
constituents, Susan Delaney, echoed the rights discourse of the feminist movement: “Day care is
a necessity if we are to preserve the female work force and our individual right to be solid
members of that work force.” Policies that restricted daycare eligibility to the children of women
receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children “discriminated against both the middle
income groups and the lower income groups. First, it eliminates middle income families from
40
Letter from Mrs. Donna Kaplan to Bella Abzug, May 23, 1971, folder: Child Care Correspondence 1970-1971,
box 138, Bella Abzug Papers, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University. In the post-war period,
continued job segregation and unequal pay meant that female household heads could not earn enough to cover childcare costs. Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, 311-12.
41
Letter from Carol Schoenwolf to Bella Abzug, February 16, 1971, folder: Child Care Correspondence 1970-1971,
box 138, Bella Abzug Papers, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University.
42
Working Women’s Conference Pamphlet, “Working Women Unite!” folder 31, box 2, Annie Popkin Papers,
Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
13
day care and second, it prohibits vertical mobility among welfare families.”43 Delaney’s dual
challenge to sex and class discrimination reveals how an overlapping need among working-class
and middle-class women shaped the second wave feminist conception of childcare.
B. The Emergence of a Rights Discourse: Title VII and the Women’s Strike for Equality
The enactment of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act provided normative and legal
justifications for maternal employment, spurring a feminist campaign for childcare. For the first
time, Title VII had prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of sex. Representative
Martha Griffiths had engineered the sex provision by aligning with Southern Democrats who
happily anticipated that its inclusion would render the entire bill ridiculous and vulnerable defeat.
They misjudged. It was not until 1966 with the formation of the National Organization for
Women that, under pressure, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) began to
bring employment discrimination suits on behalf of women.44 Title VII pushed the childcare
debate, which had long settled on the rationale of poor women’s financial need, to confront
women’s right to work. In order to realize true equal employment opportunity, women needed
childcare as well as a legal prohibition on sex-based employment discrimination.
As the women’s movement grew, the rhetoric of its leaders advanced beyond its concrete
achievements and left many women straddling the gap. Feminist leaders fought for employment
rights and stressed women’s self-fulfillment through paid work without waiting for the
legislative and social changes that would relieve women of total childrearing responsibility. In a
letter to the editor of Everywoman, B. Ware observed sarcastically that “getting up at 6 to get
children ready to take to a sitter, getting into makeup and girdle, working all day at a
meaningless job for nothing pay just so you can have the reward of doing the housework from
43
Letter from Susan Delaney to Bella Abzug, February 28, 1973, folder: Child Care Correspondence 1973, box 138,
Bella Abzug Papers, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University.
44
Harrison, On Account of Sex, 176-209.
14
after dinner till you collapse in bed is no great exchange for what we’ve got.”45 At a time when
women suffered from pervasive job segregation that kept them in low-status jobs and paid them
poorly, employment could mean further exploitation rather than liberation. For women without
college degrees, in particular, employment ensured neither financial security nor personal
satisfaction.46 But it was not wage-work, itself, to which Ware objected. Rather, the lack of
daycare facilities, the high cost of existing childcare arrangements, uninspiring job prospects,
and the tremendous workload facing mothers made employment unattractive.
Individualized and gendered responsibility for childrearing limited not only the
employment opportunities of womens such as B. Ware, but also their capacity to engage in
public activism. Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique and one of the most prominent
voices of the national women’s movement, recognized that despite heightened consciousness
among women, many had not joined feminist organizations. A mobilizing action would attract
the unaffiliated and bring together numerous groups of organized women—the women’s
liberationist consciousness raising groups, the older, politically established women previously
wary of identifying as feminists, and black women fighting for welfare rights.47 Friedan
conceived of a galvanizing event: the Women’s Strike for Equality to be held August 26, 1970.
The Strike would both organize and visually perform women’s political power. Friedan
envisioned masses of striking women converging at dusk on city halls across the country.48 “I
propose that the women who are doing menial chores in the offices cover their typewriters and
B. Ware, “Dear Everywoman,” Everywoman 12, no. 2 (January 1, 1971): 2. Everywoman was a feminist
magazine published in Los Angeles, California during the early 1970s.
46
The same letter to the editor proceeded: “Most of us don’t have the education to get a really good job and if we
did you’ve already told us over and over there is little chance for us to get anywhere. Furthermore, we already know
that most of the ‘good jobs’ are doing things that hurt other women – the women who can’t get these jobs.” Ibid.
47
Betty Friedan, “Introduction: Call To Strike,” from Herstory Part II, folder 1010, box 30, Betty Friedan Papers,
Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
48
Betty Friedan, “Call to Women’s Strike For Equality, August 26, 1970,” folder 1186, box 35, Betty Friedan
Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
45
15
close their notebooks and the telephone operators unplug their switchboards, the waitresses stop
waiting, cleaning women stop cleaning.” The Strike would extend to domestic work, including
sex, as well as paid employment: “And when it begins to get dark, instead of cooking dinner or
making love, we will assemble.” The Strike met tremendous success: women and men in about
forty cities marched and estimates of participation in New York City alone reached 50,000.49
Friedan had selected the Strike date to mark the anniversary of the passage of the
Nineteenth Amendment granting woman suffrage, to celebrate the resurgence of the women’s
movement, and to show the distance women had yet to travel to reach equal citizenship.50 The
Strike made three demands: free, twenty-four-hour universal childcare; free, non-restricted
abortion; and equal opportunity in education and employment.51 Contrary to what we today
remember as the “liberal” ideal, feminists thought equality only began with the state’s
prohibition on discrimination in education and employment. By providing free abortions, the
state would enable women to control the conditions of biological reproduction. By providing
free childcare, the state would bring one of the family’s primary functions—childrearing—from
the home into public realm, where the entire society would assume responsibility for its
fulfillment.
II. ENVISIONING UNIVERSAL CHILDCARE
A. Redistributing Wealth
Feminist proposals to restructure the economy, from the widespread fight to open
employment opportunities to women to more extreme critiques of capitalism, included childcare.
Gloria Steinem, perhaps the most widely-read writer of second wave feminism, contended that
Judy Klemesrud, “It Was a Great Day For Women On the March,” New York Times, 30 August 1970, 1.
For a provocative discussion of how the invocation of the Nineteenth Amendment located the Strike within
women’s constitutional vision for equal citizenship, see Robert C. Post and Reva B. Siegel, “Legislative
Constitutionalism and Section Five Power: Policentric Interpretation of the Family and Medical Leave Act,” Yale
Law Journal 112 (June 2003): 1988-2001.
51
Judy Klemesrud, “A Herstory-Making Event,” New York Times, 23 August 1970, Magazine, p. 6.
49
50
16
women sought employment in order to access some of the wealth reserved to white men. In
1973, white men held 94% of jobs paying more than $15,000 per year. Steinem exhorted: “[W]e
will not allow ourselves to… fight for a very small piece of the pie while guess who has the rest.
We will change the pie. We will change the patriarchal and racist structure which has acquired
the wealth and acquired the power.”52 By demanding childcare, feminists exposed the reality of
female poverty and challenged the justice of the family wage ideal. Free universal childcare
would help to redistribute wealth between the sexes and enable women’s economic
independence, thereby equalizing power within the family, allowing women to leave unhappy or
abusive marriages, and enabling alternative family forms.53
Childcare’s potential to better women’s economic prospects held particular importance
for black and other minority women, who experienced higher rates of workforce participation
and lower wages. In 1971, fifty percent of minority women worked, compared to forty-three
percent of white women.54 Moreover, the 4.1 million minority women in the labor force
comprised its lowest paid sector.55 Black women’s material realities shaped their feminist
ideology. In an essay on the dual oppression of black women that became a theoretical guide for
African American feminists, Frances Beal suggested that economics prevented black women
from imitating the white, middle-class model of womanhood: “[I]t is idle dreaming to think of
black women simply caring for their homes and children… Most black women have to work to
Gloria Steinem, “The Women’s Movement is Revolution not Reform,” reprinted with permission from Simmons
Review (late summer-early fall, 1973), based on address at Simmons College Commencement, 1973, folder 4, box
100, Gloria Steinem Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College.
53
Cynthia Harrison, “‘A Revolution But Half Accomplished’: The Twentieth Century’s Engagement with ChildRaising, Women’s Work, and Feminism,” in The Achievement of American Liberalism: The New Deal and Its
Legacies, ed. William H. Chafe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 258.
54
U.S. Department of Labor, Employment Standards Administration, “Fact on Women Workers of Minority Races,”
folder 14, box 198, Gloria Steinem Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College. The number and percentage of
minority women workers were likely higher than those reported in official government statistics because of their
participation in undocumented occupations.
55
In 1970, the median wage or salary income for all minority women workers was $3,285, compared to $3,870 for
white women, $5,485 for minority men, and $8,254 for white men. Ibid.
52
17
help feed, house, and clothe their families.”56 The Black Women’s Liberation Committee
rejected social norms that limited women’s social function to the “sex role.” In Beal’s words, “A
woman who stays at home caring for her children and house… exists only as a satellite to her
mate. He goes out into society and brings back a little piece of the world to her… She is unable
to develop as an individual because she has been reduced to fulfilling only a biological
function.”57 Black women disdained the childlike social position of white women who did not
work. They also took a skeptical stance toward the white women’s liberation movement,
questioning whether it would enable white women to achieve equality with white men, while
only exacerbating inequality between black and white women. Despite their suspicions,
however, black women supported childcare as a movement goal that would improve their
economic position both objectively and in relation to black men and white women.58
Although feminists had an economic interest in childcare, they wanted to use childcare
not to gain status within the existing society but to change it. “We want a different world, not a
share in this one, and we demand that all people be a part of it. We demand that all people be
humane and responsible to others.”59 First, childcare would challenge the prevailing division of
labor between the female childrearer and the male breadwinner, which resulted in the
exploitation of both women’s domestic work and men’s paid work. Making childcare a
collective responsibility would enable women’s access to employment and would give men more
time with their children by facilitating new work arrangements.60 Second, the reduction in hours
Frances M. Beal, “Double Jeopardy: To be Black and Female,” in The Black Woman: An Anthology, ed. Toni
Cade (New York: Penguin, 1970), 91.
57
Ibid.
58
Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York:
William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1984), 307-08.
59
Female Liberation, “Strategy and Tactic for a Female Liberation Movement,” July 27, 1969, 4 th in a series of
lectures and discussions for females presented by Female Liberation—Cell 16, in “Female Liberation” file,
Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
60
“Day Care,” Old Mole, 6.
56
18
and increase in flexibility, catalyzed by workers’ participation in childcare, would ultimately
promote social values other than materialism and ambition. Women did not want childcare in
order to be able to mimic the long hours, materialism, and hierarchies that characterized men’s
working lives. As Gloria Steinem opined: “Women don’t want to imitate the male pattern of
obsessive work ending up with a heart attack and an engraved wrist watch. We want to
humanize the work pattern, to make new, egalitarian life styles.”61
Gloria Steinem’s critique of women’s economic position differed in degree rather than
kind from those of socialist feminists. According to groups such as the Chicago Women’s
Liberation Union, Boston-based Bread and Roses, and the Socialist Workshop in Berkeley,
California, capitalism estranged women from production outside the home and offered them, as
well as racial minorities, access only to low-pay, low-status jobs.62 In coercing women to
perform the labor necessary to reproduce the workforce—the housekeeping and childrearing—
without pay, capitalism perpetuated the family by enforcing women and children’s economic
dependence on men. Socialist feminists construed childcare as a mechanism to transform the
private, childrearing function into a public activity.63 They called for the establishment of “free,
community controlled 24 hour child-care centers,” located “at work places, at colleges and
universities, and in the community.”64 These centers, financed through business profits and
earmarked taxation of shopping areas and real estate developers, would help eliminate the
Gloria Steinem, “Why Harvard Law School Needs Women more than Women Need It,” 1971, folder 2, box 100,
Gloria Steinem Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College.
62
Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, “Why we are Against Capitalism,” 1, in “Chicago Women’s Liberation
Union” file, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
63
Berkeley / Oakland Women’s Union; a socialist-feminist organization, “Principles of Unity,” 3, in “Berkeley /
Oakland Women’s Union” file, Schlesinger Library; “Transitional Demands.”
64
“Bread and Roses Declaration of the Rights of Women,” Old Mole, no. 34 (March 6, 1970), in “Bread and Roses”
file, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University. “The Socialist Workshop: Where We Came From – Where We Are
Going,” folder 13, box 1, Nancy Osterud Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
61
19
“untenable choice most women must make between bearing children and developing
independent work.”65
Socialist feminists drew inspiration from international childcare policies. A Female
Liberation strategy session discussed how international revolutionary movements created
childcare arrangements that freed mothers from the sole responsibility of childrearing. 66 An
application for a women’s trip to Cuba promised that the Cubans would provide 24-hour day
care for the visitors’ children.67 Although idealistic, socialist feminists did not make their
strategy dependent on the overthrow of capitalism. Rather, they sought childcare as a reform
they anticipated winning in the immediate future.68
B. Transforming the Family
Although not every woman seeking government-funded childcare rejected the ideal of the
nuclear family, many feminists thought childcare would transform family relations, liberating
women and the whole of society. As historian Alice Echols describes, local groups of women
began in 1967 to mobilize against male supremacy, identifying the mother role as one root of
women’s oppression.69 The founding manifesto of the New York City-based The Feminists
emphasized women’s lack of self-fulfillment: “We are bored and isolated in our homes.”70 An
article on daycare in the Cambridge, Massachusetts underground journal Old Mole explained:
“Transitional Demands,” September 1969, folder 30, box 2, Annie Popkin Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard
University. “Bread and Roses Declaration of the Rights of Women.”
66
Female Liberation, “Strategy and Tactic for a Female Liberation Movement.”
67
“Women’s Trip to Cuba: Application,” folder 31, box 2, Annie Popkin Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard
University.
68
Hyde Park Chapter, Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, “Socialist Feminism – A Strategy for the Women’s
Movement,” 11, in “Chicago Women’s Liberation Union” file, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
69
Echols, Daring to Be Bad, 3-4. Although Echols generalizes her conclusions to the whole of the United States,
her evidence focuses on women in major cities, including New York, Washington, D.C., Boston, Chicago, and San
Francisco and the Bay Area.
70
The Feminists grew out of October 17, the group that Ti-Grace Atkinson formed after she left her position as head
of New York N.O.W. over the chapter’s refusal to support the repeal of abortion laws and hierarchical procedures.
Echols, Daring to Be Bad, 167-69. “Manifesto for a New Women’s Liberation Organization in NY,” in “The
Feminists – New York City” file, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
65
20
“As women try to understand their own oppression, they keep coming up against one central
thing: our society says a woman’s first job is to take care of her children – alone, in her own
house, all the time.”71 According to Old Mole, the social norms confining women to the private
sphere distorted their personalities and justified public discrimination against them: “That is why
she is taught to be passive and self-sacrificing, that is why she is paid less, educated less, torn by
guilt, isolated, and harassed.”72 In addition to oppressing women, the nuclear family also
promoted negative values, including individualism, private property, and private space, that
damaged civic society and inhibited common struggle.73
Collectivizing childcare would challenge the nuclear family and, by extension, patriarchal
society. The exploitation of women’s biological capacity to bear children linked individual
women as a political class.74 The struggle for childcare thereby held potential to advance
women’s political consciousness: “Struggles to free women from domestic slavery which may
begin around demands for a neighborhood or factory childcare center can lead to consciousness
of the crippling effects of relations of domination and exploitation in the home, and to
understanding of how the institutions of marriage and the family… destroy human potential.”75
Feminists argued that childrearing was “the responsibility of a whole community, the whole
society.”76 By socializing one of the family’s primary functions, childcare would grant women
expanded personal autonomy, the capacity to earn independent incomes, escape from the
“Day Care,” Old Mole no.33 (February 20, 1970): 6, in folder 8f+, box 1, Nancy Osterud Papers, Schlesinger
Library, Harvard University.
72
Ibid.
73
Linda Gordon, “Families,” folder 31, box 2, Annie Popkin Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
74
Ti-Grace Atkinson, “Radical Feminism,” Notes from the Second Year (1970): 34.
75
Kathy McAfee & Myrna Wood, “What is the Revolutionary Potential of Women’s Liberation?” 15, in “New
England Free Press” file, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
76
Letter from Bread and Roses, “Dear Sister,” circa 1971, folder 6, box 1, Nancy Osterud Papers, Schlesinger
Library, Harvard University.
71
21
confinement of their intimate relationships to those shared with husbands and children, and
ultimately the freedom to redefine their social roles.77
C. Educating and Liberating Children: The Influence of Child Development
Social Science and Sixties Counterculture
Women drew on an emergent child development discourse, which built on the New Deal
legacy of government intervention in child welfare, as well as on new concerns about poverty
and racial inequality, to assert the state’s responsibility for children’s welfare. In the postwar
period, academic sociologists and psychologists began to discuss the positive effects of cognitive
stimulation on young children’s verbal performance and intelligence. Politicians picked up on
the promise that educational daycare would compensate for the disadvantages poor children
faced. In the early 1960s, child development scholars partnered with Kennedy administration
officials engaged in the War on Poverty to create Head Start, which offered health, education and
social services to low-income children.78 Child development experts convinced politicians of
Head Start’s cost-effectiveness by predicting reduced delinquency and heightened educational
performance among poor and minority youth.79 With Head Start as a model, the notion that
comprehensive daycare served an educational rather than a custodial purpose gained in
popularity among politicians, academics, and the public.
Women from across the social spectrum subscribed to many of the values espoused by
child development scholarship even as they leveraged this discourse to promote the childcare
cause. Making childrearing a public responsibility would ensure the provision of adequate
nutrition, medical care, and educational enrichment, which could not be guaranteed in the case of
“Day Care,” 6.
Berry, Politics of Parenthood, 132-34.
79
Michel, Children’s Interests / Mother’s Rights, 246.
77
78
22
private childrearing.80 Women’s liberationist newspapers, N.O.W., and the National League of
Women Voters all advocated developmental rather than simply custodial care.81 Writing in 1973
of proposed reductions in the eligibility levels for New York State provided childcare, Susan
Delaney proclaimed: “Day care is the right of every child; it is not an accident of birth. It is also
very beneficial to children when they enter schools. If we are to derive the most from our public
schools, day care is a necessity.” 82 By framing daycare in terms of child development, women
placed their economic needs in line with their children’s education and growth.
Feminists influenced by sixties counterculture heralded childcare as a means to liberate
children from societal oppression as well as to nurture their cognitive and physical capacities.
Childcare would offer a superior social environment to the nuclear family, which corrupted the
relationship between parents and children. Because society forced women to make a tradeoff
between their childrearing abilities and their other human capacities, women could not feel
satisfied in their roles as mothers.83 Raising children could be “rewarding and creative,” but
women’s lack of choice made it a “degrading occupation.” One article conveyed frustration and
anger: “Raising children can’t help but become a resented occupation when it involves 24 hour a
day responsibility.” Giving responsibility for childcare to people who chose it as an occupation,
would resolve the tension between parents’ personal needs and children’s needs for consistent
love and affection.84
Largely white, middle-class women evinced a concern for preserving the integrity of
childhood that mirrored their own disillusionment with the conformist, exploitative, and violent
Lisa Leghorn, “Child-Care for the Child,” Everywoman 1, no. 13 (January 22, 1971): 8.
Lisa Leghorn, “child care for the child,” off our backs 1, no. 9 (July 31, 1970): 9; National League of Women
Voters Pamphlet, “Day Care: Who Needs It?”; Untitled, folder 205, box 6, Boston N.O.W. Records, Schlesinger
Library, Harvard University.
82
Letter from Susan Delaney to Bella Abzug, February 28, 1973.
83
“Manifesto for a New Women’s Liberation Organization in NY,” 1, in “The Feminists – New York City” file,
Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
84
Leghorn, “Child-Care for the Child,” Everywoman.
80
81
23
society they felt their parents had produced.85 As participants in the counterculture, they rejected
the stultifying elements of bourgeois society.86 Children, in their view, inherently demonstrated
the authenticity of experience and the moral goodness, which they wanted society to emulate.87
One woman became a daycare worker after a soul-searching process during which she
questioned the purpose of abstract, ideological movements. She remarked on her experience:
“All the apathy and cynicism we so often feel seems to disappear each time a kid laughs or tries
to catch a sunbeam… [T]o watch a kid comfort another or question why you just got angry or
take off all his clothes and kiss his boyfriend on the lips, makes you know what the revolution is
all about.”88
Feminists imagined childcare centers which would instill socially transformative values,
behaviors, and skills in children. Childcare would offer children the opportunity to form
relationships with other children and adults, broadening their experience beyond their isolation in
the nuclear family.89 As a result, children would develop “social sensitivity and responsibility,
emotional autonomy and trust, and a wider range of intellectual interests.”90 Centers would
emphasize cooperation rather than control and would help children gain skills in group problemsolving.91 Liberationist childcare would teach children to maintain an honest, questioning
perspective on their social environment. Instead of seeking to adjust their own desires to their
85
For an overview of the attitudes young participants in the New Left had toward American society, see Wini
Breines, “‘Of This Generation:’ The New Left and the Student Movement,” in Long Time Gone: Sixties America
Then and Now, ed. Alexander Bloom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 23-45.
86
Wini Breines discusses the origins of these women’s grievances in Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up
Female in the Fifties (Boston: Beacon Books, 1992).
87
Ibid., 27.
88
“Newer People,” Berkeley Tribe 14, no. 9 (March 19, 1971): 10.
89
“Manifesto for a New Women’s Liberation Organization in NY;” Louise Gross and Phyllis MacEwan, “On Day
Care,” Women: A Journal of Liberation 1, no. 2 (Winter 1970): 27.
90
“On Day Care,” 27.
91
“On Day Care,” 27; priscilla zirker, “the politics of day care,” off our backs 1, no. 9 (July 31, 1970): 8.
24
parents’ expectations, children would learn to take responsibility for shaping the world in
accordance with their ideals.92
Parents viewed childcare’s capacity to instill a sense of social responsibility as a means to
advance racial as well as gender equality. While the House subcommittee advancing the
Comprehensive Child Development Act in Congress believed that “poor children develop faster
in mixed groups,”93 some white, middle-class feminist parents also valued the opportunity to
send their children to economically diverse daycare. One father, an attorney at a prominent New
York City firm, wrote to Abzug urging her to oppose cuts in federal childcare funding:
“economically mixed student and family representation… is threatened by the passage of the
Revenue Sharing Act which limits the amount of money the Federal Government through Title
IV_A of the Social Security Act can grant to states and cities for day care and other social
services.”94
Black communities had long viewed childcare as important to the movement for racial
justice, as evidenced by the grassroots organization of the Missisippi Child Development Group,
which served as a precursor to Head Start, and by the daycare programs of the Black Panthers. 95
In 1978, The National Black Theatre, Inc., of Harlem, founded a decade earlier to promote
cultural knowledge and pride, initiated a childcare project that would teach children to take
responsibility for their community “by improving upon it rather than moving out or away from
“Child-Care for the Child,” Everywoman, 18.
Deirdre Carmody, “50 Centers for Day Care Planned for City by 1973,” New York Times, 23 March 1971, 1.
94
Letter from Albert S. Pergam to Representative Bella S. Abzug, December 26, 1972, folder: Child Care
Correspondence 1973, box 138, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Pergam was an attorney at
Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton.
95
Berry, Politics of Parenthood, 134; Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition
and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 328-30, 342-48.
92
93
25
it—even when the community being dealt with is composed of building blocks and a rag doll.”96
The Theatre solicited grant advice from the Women’s Action Alliance, an organization formed in
1971 by Gloria Steinem, Brenda Feigen, Catherine Samuels, and others to coordinate resources
among grassroots feminists.97 By improving relations between parents and children, preserving
the integrity of childhood, and teaching children desirable social values, childcare would help to
bring about a more just society.
D. Empowering Communities
Conflicting purposes converged in the realm of childcare, and the mechanism and
character of its implementation would determine whether it served conservative or
transformative goals. In the minds of some feminists, politicians supporting daycare saw an
opportunity to socialize poor children and to push poor women into low-skilled, low-paying
jobs.98 One feminist magazine exposed how a government-funded Social Administration
Research Institute simultaneously endorsed employer-provided childcare and sex stereotyping:
“An employer… may be able to tap a new source of workers, particularly if his production
process involves the repetitive or manipulative procedures of a type that can be serviced best by
women.”99 Certainly, Nixon’s actions substantiated the feminists’ understanding of the political
landscape. The president requested childcare funds as part of his welfare package, and although
he advocated educational rather than merely custodial care, he held as his primary goal the
reduction of welfare rolls.100
“Grant application to the New York Foundation, infant and toddler childcare and education project, (July 1, 1976June 30, 1978), National Black Theater, Inc.,” folder 25, box 245, Women’s Action Alliance Records, Sophia Smith
Collection, Smith College.
97
Finding aid prepared by Marla Miller, 2000, Women’s Action Alliance Records, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith
College.
98
“Community Day Care,” St. Louis Outlaw 1, no. 13 (March 5, 1971): 8.
99
“The Day Care Busine$$,” Everywoman 1, no. 16 (March 26, 1971): 15 (emphasis in the original).
100
Patricia Lynden, “What Day Care Means to the Children, the Parents, the Teachers, the Community, the
President,” New York Times, 15 February 1970, 31.
96
26
Just as the federal and state governments had a stake in childcare, so too did corporations.
Company-sponsored daycare programs offered the attractive possibility of reducing employee
turnover and absenteeism among female workers. In 1971 only eleven firms across the country
had established daycare programs.101 With numerous pieces of childcare legislation pending in
Congress including the CCDA and Nixon’s welfare proposal, however, Forbes magazine
reported that “[s]niffing possible federal largesse, some 50 firms have rushed into the business of
franchising or packaging day care centers.”102 Fortune magazine identified companies “tied to
central cities and heavily dependent on relatively low-paid female labor” as “the vanguard of the
move toward company-sponsored day care.” Singer Co. ran four suburban Singer Learning
Centers—operating as both schools for three to eight year-olds and daycare centers—in Cherry
Hill, New Jersey, Port Jefferson, New York, Worthington, Ohio, and Columbia, Maryland.
Singer planned the centers as commercial operations, though with a lesser expected capital
return. Other companies, however, including twenty-six in Benton Harbor and St. Joseph,
Michigan and Avco Corporation’s printing and publishing plant in the low-income RoxburyDorchester area of Boston, had operating costs greater than what they could charge families and
consequently found breaking even difficult.103
Corporate-sponsored childcare may have made life easier for working-class women long
a presence in the labor force and also may have opened opportunities for additional women to
combine childrearing with paid employment. Forbes commented: “There are many social critics
who think that the family as we know it—the father in the office and mother in the kitchen—is
on the way out. How ironic if the big corporations, supposedly bastions of conservatism, were to
“What’s a Mother to Do?” Newsweek.
“Corporate Baby-Sitting,” Forbes 107 (June 1, 1971): 19-20.
103
“Corporate Care for Kids,” Fortune 84:104 (September 1971): 9-14.
101
102
27
hasten this social evolution.”104 At the same time, however, corporate daycare primarily served
profit motives; companies promoted their own sympathetic images while reinforcing a cultural
association between women and childrearing. Fortune subtitled a pleasant photo-spread and
sidebar on daycare at telephone companies “In Ma Bell’s maternal arms,” a metaphor manifested
literally in Illinois Bell’s program to provide daycare for employees’ children in the homes of
123 trained local women.105
To feminists, corporate-sponsored daycare aimed to prevent a potential social and
political “explosion” resulting from the escalating conflict between women’s entry into the
workplace and the need for childcare. Companies’ response represented an attempt to diffuse
women’s liberation: “Day care is the managerial solution for keeping the ‘quiet’ revolution
quiet.”106 Aware of the precarious position of feminist ideals in the expansion of daycare
services, one alternative journal warned:
They want women to work.
They want women to come to work on time.
They want women to work more efficiently.
They want women to be dependable.
So they give you day care.
Corporate daycare would neither grant women greater power at work nor help them to change
family relations:
1. They want more women to work.
2. They want to control the way kids grow up.
3. Without destroying the family.107
“Corporate Baby Sitting,” Forbes.
“Corporate Care for Kids,” Fortune.
106
florika & gilda, “the politics of day care,” Women: A Journal of Liberation 1, no. 2 (Winter 1970): 30.
107
florika & gilda, “the politics of day care,” Women: A Journal of Liberation 1, no. 2 (Winter 1970): 30.
104
105
28
Childcare controlled by corporations or the government would enable women to take jobs; yet,
these opportunities, though welcome in many respects, would also likely extend women’s
subordination to big business and the state.
Even more disturbing to feminists than the ulterior interests behind companies’ provision
of childcare to employees, were the emergent corporations in the business of selling daycare as a
commodity. On June 22 and 23 1970, one hundred women twice invaded a New York City
conference entitled “Profit Possibilities in the 70’s in Early Learning and Child Care.”
Outnumbering the delegates two to one, the women rejected an offer to send representatives to
the conference and instead broke through guarded doors and assumed the stage. Protesters
insisted “that the conference be ended, that all delegates’ fees be turned over to people-controlled
child care centers, that government funds go only to parent-controlled, non-profit child care.”108
The women perceived an “unholy alliance” in which Wall Street encouraged investment in “the
last remaining capital intensive industry;” government favored a cheap and politically palatable
alternative to welfare; and daycare franchises yielded twelve to eighteen percent returns. The
protestors objected not only to the form of commercial daycare but to the very idea that
corporations would profit at women and children’s expense. “There is one thing that the
representatives from government, Wall Street, and day care franchisers agree upon: selling day
care is okay. We believe that good child care programs are a right…. what should rationally be
a right, has become a commodity.”109
Opposing the commodification of childcare, feminists asserted the state’s obligation to
provide childcare as a right and simultaneously rejected state control over childcare programs.
The St. Louis Outlaw, a progressive magazine, declared: “We must understand the need for child
“fleecing the pre-school sheep,” off our backs 1, no. 9 (July 31, 1970): 5; “‘Sheep Fleecers’ Confronted by
Women’s Liberation,” WIN Magazine 6, no. 12 (July 1970): 29.
109
“fleecing the pre-school sheep,” 5.
108
29
care programs which grow out of the needs of a community, not the needs of the government or
corporations.”110 For childcare centers to serve as an institution that empowered women, local
communities rather than government or business had to have decision-making authority.111
Women called upon “the government, corporations, and universities” to offer “free space and
money” for childcare, but sought to operate centers themselves.112 Although women drew upon
the popularity of child development studies to advocate for childcare, they also recognized
pernicious aspects of this discourse. Feminists denounced social science research based on
assumptions about the incompetence of lower-class mothers, their children’s resultant cognitive
deficiencies, and the need to help ghetto children appropriately adapt to their school
environments. In March 1970, the University of Florida held the “National Early Childhood
Intervention Research Conference” with the theme: “Programming parents to program children.”
An article in Everywoman criticized the conference for discussing poor children’s
underachievement while ignoring structural considerations such as malnutrition, inadequate
housing, and exploitative work conditions.113
Black and Latina feminists established childcare projects that met the needs of minority
children without reinforcing racial stereotypes. African American childcare activist Dorothy
Pitman articulated the position of those who demanded government funding but mistrusted
government control: “‘You know, I think I can live without bureaucracy. I think most black
people could, too. It is the real villain,—bureaucracy is a way to exploit. I don’t want my
children to be stifled, to be the conformists that most schools turn out. I want them to be free.”114
In Congressional hearings on the Comprehensive Child Development Act, Director of the Black
“Community Day Care,” St. Louis Outlaw 1, no. 13 (March 5, 1971): 8 (emphasis in original).
“Socialist Feminism—A Strategy for the Women’s Movement,” 11.
112
“Community Day Care,” 8 (emphasis in original).
113
“The Day Care Busine$$,” 15.
114
Lynden, “What Day Care Means.”
110
111
30
Child Development Institute Evelyn Moore testified that most child development research had
done “nothing more than to solidify societal beliefs about the inferiority of black children.”115
The Institute presented legislators with a set of proposals designed to maximize minority
community involvement in childcare programs.116 In December 1971, the Women’s Action
Alliance began a bilingual, bicultural daycare initiative under the direction of Lupe Anguiano.
According to Anguiano, existing programs funded by the federal Department of Health,
Education, and Welfare, lacked community involvement, assaulted children’s cultural and
linguistic identities, and failed as a consequence of their misguided assumptions about poor and
minority children.117 The Alliance advanced “integrated projects where white, black and ethnic
minority children and parents learn to communicate with each other in an atmosphere of equality
where English is not made to be a superior language.”118
Pitman founded one such progressive center, the West 80th Street Community Day Care
Center in New York City governed by a board of directors comprised entirely of parents. The
Center, which had survived for three years on private donations and small government grants,
was in early 1970 negotiating for permanent funds from the city’s Department of Social
Services. Commissioner Jack Goldberg, however, opposed the Center’s request on the basis that
“‘community-control activists are interested in a whole community-organization effort, and they
are really trying to build a power base.’”119 Goldberg, in the midst of defending city welfare
115
Congress, Senate, Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty and Subcommittee on Children and
Youth, Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, S.1512: To Amend the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 to
Provide for a Comprehensive Child Development Program in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare,
part 1, 92nd Cong., 1st sess., 13 and 20 May 1971 [hereinafter Senate Hearings].
116
BCDI, Inc., “Fact sheet,” in Senate Hearings, 376. Black Child Development Institute, “From a Black
Perspective: Optimum Conditions For Minority Involvement In Quality Child Development Programming” in
Senate Hearings, 386-413.
117
Ibid., 2-3.
118
Lupe Anguiano, “Women’s Action Alliance, Incorporated Bilingual Bicultural Day Care Technical Assistance
Program,” 1, December 28, 1971, folder 15, box 177, Gloria Steinem Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith
College.
119
Ibid.
31
procedure from due process challenges before the United States Supreme Court, worried that
prospective daycare workers’ salaries would also fund non-childcare related political activity.120
The New York Times commented that Nixon’s plan to provide childcare to welfare recipients
might have the ironic consequence of providing a base for the formation of a “politicized and
militant” constituency.121
By 1970, four strands of ideology and activism about women, work, and the state
converged in an escalating campaign for childcare. First, working- and middle-class women
argued for childcare based both on financial necessity and on women’s newly-affirmed right to
work. Feminism’s integration of needs and rights situated childcare advocacy within a critique
of the capitalist economy. Second, feminists argued for childcare as a valuable social innovation
rather than simply a social service. Instead of preserving the stability of the nuclear family,
childcare would transform the oppressive traditional family. Third, child development science
constituted a cultural currency useful to political advocacy and influenced women’s conception
of childcare’s educational benefits, while countercultural values shaped their perception of its
liberating qualities. Fourth, women of varying class, race, and ideological backgrounds argued
for community-controlled childcare to control its form and the values it cultivated. The
combined political force of these multiple discourses crystallized in practical collaboration
between middle-class and working-class, black and white women.
Welfare rights litigation groups orchestrated a case challenging New York City’s termination of public assistance
benefits without prior notice and a hearing, as a violation of the due process clause of the 14 th Amendment. The
U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments for Goldberg v. Kelley, 397 U.S. 254, in March 1969. When the New York
Times reported on the politically contentious funding debate between Pitman’s West 80 th Street Center and
Goldberg, the Court had not yet reached its decision. Just over one month later, on March 23, 1970, the Court ruled
in favor of the plaintiffs,
121
Lynded, “What Day Care Means.”
120
32
III. BUILDING A MOVEMENT
Childcare served to bind women together across race and class lines. White, middle-class
feminists recognized that socioeconomic differences complicated their organizing efforts:
“[W]orking class people are different... There are reasons to work with the working class; to
learn a lot, to give skills to people, to help inspire a vision. But we don’t face the economic
problems they do.” Because women’s common need for childcare bridged class differences, it
posed a strategic focal point for activism: “It’s beginning to make more sense to me that we
should develop alternatives out of our own experiences… Perhaps organizing around childcare…
there are many bases for unity.”122 Although dedicated to racial equality, the Hyde Park Chapter
of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union also felt unable to organize white women against
racism directly. “However, uniting white and black groups around common concerns would be a
concrete way to objectively also fight racism.”123
Middle-class women regarded childcare as a primary material need of “black, hispanic,
working-class, third world” women.124 Although many middle-class feminists themselves
viewed childcare as a means of liberation from the nuclear family, they understood that childcare
could support working-class families in stress. For women without the educational skills or
employment opportunities necessary to attain economic independence, the nuclear family did not
only represent oppression; it also represented the sole means to financial security. “An
uneducated working class wife with five kids… is hardly in a position to repudiate her source of
livelihood and free herself of those children. If we expect that of her, we will never build a
movement.” Until a time when childcare, cooperative living, and free birth control changed the
122
Letter to Carole, June 9, 1970, folder 7, box 1, Annie Popkin Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
“Socialist Feminism – A Strategy for the Women’s Movement,” 10.
124
Draft Proposal, “CARASA and Child Care Politics & Program,” in “CARASA” file, Schlesinger Library,
Harvard University.
123
33
conditions of women’s lives, dogmatic insistence that movement participants oppose the nuclear
family would only impede feminism’s success.125 Although their own reasons for desiring
childcare differed in emphasis from those of working class women, middle-class feminists
appreciated the justice as well as the strategic advantage in providing working-class women with
childcare and other practical supports.126
Despite varying motivations, the commonality of women’s interests in childcare, coupled
with feminist organizations’ outreach strategies, spurred cross-class and interracial day care
advocacy groups and cooperatives. There was tremendous need for such efforts. In 1970, a
study of 2,000 Massachusetts working mothers revealed that only four percent were able to
access daycare centers for their children. Responding to this shortage, a group of black and
white women in Jamaica Plains, comprised of both welfare recipients and non-recipients,
successfully waged a two-year campaign to gain funding for a center. A similar group won
daycare in Cambridge through a city-funded Community Schools program.127
A Chicago coalition of black and white women, the Action Committee for Decent Child
Care (ACDC), sought childcare that would meet the needs of working and non-working women.
Black and white women both desired childcare: “In a black area, women demanded the creation
of child care centers, because there were none. In an adjoining white area, women demanded
that the few existing centers not be closed down.” ACDC leaders had initially anticipated an allwhite constituency, but an organic alliance of interests soon resulted in an interracial
organization.128
Kathy McAfee & Myrna Wood, “What is the Revolutionary Potential of Women’s Liberation?” 17, in “New
England Free Press” file, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
126
“Letter from Nancy Hawley and Marya Levenson,” circa 1971, folder 6, box 1, Nancy Osterud Papers,
Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
127
“Day Care,” 6.
128
“Socialist Feminism—A Strategy for the Women’s Movement,” 18.
125
34
In formulating their strategy, ACDC encountered two barriers. First, the vision of “free,
24-hour, client-controlled childcare … seemed so wild-eyed, so far from the existing situation,
that it appeared completely unrealistic.” ACDC needed to win some specific goals before the
women they organized gained a sense of their power to effect change.129 Accordingly,
organizers spent three months gathering information about the constituencies in need of childcare
and potential institutional targets at the state level, in city government, and in the private
sector.130 Second, ACDC’s founders realized that the “prevailing notion that women need
something to do after their children are in school” made the population most in need, the least
likely to participate.131 Accordingly, ACDC coupled city-wide action with local community
groups more responsive to mothers’ limited time and mobility and better situated to develop
members’ different skills.132 ACDC overcame obstacles to conduct petition campaigns, host
community forums, research local conditions, and organize citywide direct actions. They
worked with local government to change onerous licensing procedures, opened city meetings on
childcare to the public, and coordinated services and resources to meet community needs.133
IV. FIGHTING FOR CHILDCARE
A. Autonomous Solutions
Before campaigning for national legislation, women took several other avenues to
address their childcare needs. Autonomous cooperatives placed the least burden on external
institutions. Influenced by a countercultural ethos that spurned individualism and private family
life for collective living and shared resources, the women’s movement encouraged mothers and
“Socialist Feminism—A Strategy for the Women’s Movement,” 15.
Ibid., 16-17.
131
Ibid., 15.
132
Ibid., 18.
133
“Women’s Action Alliance Progress Report,” July 31, 1972, folder 10, box 14, Women’s Action Alliance
Records, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College.
129
130
35
childless women, alike, to share childcare responsibilities.134 Some women formed cooperatives
simply to escape the loneliness of isolated childrearing.135 Finding the necessary money for rent,
food, equipment, and supplies, however, proved an exceptionally difficult endeavor.136
Negotiating state licensing regulations, which included prohibitions on care for children under
six months, separate sleeping rooms for girls and boys, specific numbers of toilets, and other
safety codes, also required considerable time and energy.137 Logistical tribulations, conflicting
childrearing practices among parents, and resistance from the children themselves, doomed many
efforts.138
Some feminists critiqued cooperatives because they best suited middle-class parents who
needed only part-time childcare and could not be utilized by full-time workers who lacked the
time necessary to reciprocate services.139 At a November 1970 conference at Grinnell College,
socialist feminist Marlene Dixon criticized childcare cooperatives for failing to serve adequate
numbers of children and for requiring the time—effectively the money—of working class
parents. She accepted, however, that “free, 24-hour child care [was] a revolutionary demand.”140
Cooperative members were not necessarily insensitive to class dynamics nor of homogenous
134
In Motherhood Reconceived (46-51), Lauri Umansky writes that feminist childcare cooperatives reflected the
countercultural Left’s emphasis on collectivism. In addition, the trend toward communalism in the women’s
movement was a pragmatic response to rising numbers of single women with children and without financial support
from fathers. On an ideological level, the cooperative ethic rejected bourgeois materialism. One editorialist in
Oregon articulated this philosophy:
“When I was growing up, taking responsibility for people out side of my family wasn’t a natural thing, it was being
‘nice.’ My father made plenty of money and it was our money to use for us and give to AFSC once in a while.
There wasn’t a neighborhood washing machine or two, every single house had a washing machine, and a car, and a
t.v., etc … I see childcare co-ops as a way of changing this.” Leslie B. Tanner, “Child Care / Sleepover Collective,”
Women: A Journal of Liberation 2, no. 2 (Winter 1971): 21.
135
“Raising Children the Cooperative Way,” Madison Kaleidoscope 3, no. 8 (March 17, 1971): 6.
136
“A Woman’s Place,” folder 31, box 2, Annie Popkin Papers, Schlesinger Library; Child Care / Sleepover
Collective,” 22.
137
“the children’s house,” off our backs, 1, no. 17 (February 12, 1971): 8-9.
138
“S E Day Care Lives,” Willamette Bridge 4, no. 11 (March 18, 1971): 4. Child Care / Sleepover Collective,” 22.
139
Sybil Macapia, “Babysitting Co-ops; the hows and wherefores,” Northwest Passage 5, no. 12 (October 10, 1971):
6.
140
“Political Tendencies in the Movement,” 1, in “Cell 16” file, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University; “Women’s
Liberation, Where,” Everywoman 1, no. 14 (February 5, 1971): 16.
36
backgrounds.141 Yet, cooperatives were constrained by the effort required to replicate them, their
class limitations, and their failure to extract concessions from external institutions. Ultimately,
cooperatives made parents do a whole lot of work that the state evaded by denying a right to
government-funded childcare.
B. Targeting Employers, Universities, and Cities
Recognizing that autonomous cooperatives were an impracticable solution, feminists
pressured external institutions, including unions, employers, colleges and universities, and city
governments, to provide childcare. Several unions used collective bargaining to extract support
for childcare from corporations. After workers at the University of Indiana at Bloomington
requested release-time from work in order to participate in childcare cooperatives, nearby
workers at Westinghouse and General Electric discussed similar actions.142 The Amalgamated
Clothing Workers in a five-state region headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland, set up unionoperated childcare centers financed through a health and welfare fund paid by employers.143 The
fifty participating clothing manufacturers found motivation to partner with the union in the fact
that women comprised the majority of their workforce.144
Many students’ ability to continue school and further their chances for upward economic
mobility depended on the availability of childcare. Student activists who pressured colleges and
universities to provide funding and space for childcare, however, most often encountered
141
White, middle-class parents saw cooperatives as a way to forge alternative childcare arrangements without
exploiting hired maids or nannies. “the children’s house,” 9. Working-class women and men, too, formed
cooperatives: “One of the most important needs in the community is for some kind of low cost child care center run
cooperatively by members of the neighborhood. We need this so working mothers and fathers do not have to worry
about where their pre-school children are during the day or spend extra money for day care outside the Loop.” “Day
Care Center,” St. Louis Outlaw, 1, no. 11 (January 22, 1971): 4.
142
“Political Tendencies in the Movement,” 2.
143
The centers included: “a $1 million center in Baltimore for 235 children; one in Staunton, Va. for 250; in
Chambersburg, Pa., for 300; in Hanover, Pa., for 80; and a fifth N.O.W. being built in McConnellsburg, Pa.” “bread
and day care,” off our backs, 1, no. 17 (February 12, 1971): 15.
144
“Corporate Baby-Sitting,” Forbes, 19.
37
strenuous opposition.145 On a Monday morning in May 1971, a group of thirty female and male
students and community members assembled with their children to conduct a “Wet-in” at Wayne
State University. They planned to take their children to the administrative office and leave them
there for university officials to watch while they attended class. The University quickly closed
off the offices, but a vice-president listened to the protesters’ request for immediate daycare
space, informing them that none was available.146 After a year of meetings, the vice-president
told the persistent parents that a nearby church had offered them space.147 At Contra Costa
College, students first gathered 1500 signatures on a childcare petition; then built a sandbox and
play yard on the campus lawn; and finally, a year later, brought their children to the student
lounge and put up signs marking it as the student nursery. By December 1970, the nursery was
serving thirty children a day and seeking university and government funds that would enable it to
serve more than 200 children.148 Students at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Florida
State University, Peralta Junior College in Berkeley, California, the University of Massachusetts
in Boston, Portland State University, the University of Oregon, Ohio State University, and
Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California all won campaigns for university-funded
childcare.149
145
For example, Waubonsie Junior College in Aurora, Illinois, offered two-year, vocationally-oriented training to
members of the local, lower-middle class and largely Hispanic community. The College’s program presented an
ideal opportunity for single mothers to gain the skills necessary to secure employment that would adequately support
their families. When a group of women tried to open a childcare center at the College, however, the Board of
Trustees repeatedly argued lack of money, lack of space, and the proposed center’s illegality. Letter from Linda
Votaw to Brenda Feigen Fasteau, January 24, 2972, folder 6, box 260,Women’s Action Alliance Records, Sophia
Smith Collection, Smith College.
146
“Wayne State Wet-in,” The Fifth Estate 6, no. 2 (May 13, 1971): 10.
147
Barbara Carson, “WSU Day Care,” The Fifth Estate 6, no. 5 (June 3, 1971): 2.
148
“Contra Costa Students Set Up Child Care,” Freedom News 4, no. 14 (December 1970): 36.
149
Ann Arbor Sun, no. 18 (Oct. 15, 1971): 3; Edcentric 3, no. 4 (May 1971): 25; “Closing Merritt Child Care,”
Berkeley Tribe 5, no. 23 (July 9, 1971): 2; “Merritt,” Berkeley Tribe 5:25 (July 30, 1971): 3; “Day Care,” 6; “PSU
Day Care,” Willamette Bridge 4, no. 25 (June 24, 1971): 3; “ASUO Child Care Center – ‘Not just a place to dump
your kids’” Augur 2, no. 6 (Dec. 3, 1970): 10; Letter from Kathy Jenkins to the Women’s Action Alliance, reply sent
April 19, 1973, folder 9, box 111, Women’s Action Alliance Records, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College;
“Child Care Victory at Foothill,” Free You, no. 31 (Dec. 9, 1970): 21.
38
Just as student activists targeted universities, grassroots feminist organizations pursued
cities as sources of financial and administrative support for childcare. Feminists thought that
cities should not raise taxes to fund childcare centers, but should redirect already expropriated
monies that had not been used to provide social services. The D.C. Day Care Coalition secured a
$40,000 grant to set up centers that were three-quarters funded by the federal government under
Title IVA of the Social Security Act and one-quarter funded by the D.C. government.150 In New
York City, a group of non-funded centers asked for emergency monies from the Department of
Social Services to sustain operating budgets and staff salaries. To demonstrate “the strength of
their intentions,” twelve centers stopped traffic on Columbus Avenue when they moved children,
toys, and tables into the street.151 The Eastern Massachusetts (Boston) NOW chapter, which had
worked since its inception in November 1969 to reform state daycare laws and to establish its
own parent-controlled childcare center, in September 1970, opened the Children’s Center, Inc.,
in Brookline, Massachusetts.152
The New England Women’s Coalition, which grew out of the collaboration among a
number of area women’s groups organizing the Boston Women’s Strike for Equality,
campaigned to place a childcare referendum on the November 1971 Cambridge ballot.153 The
150
Ibid.
beverly leman, “liberated child care centers,” off our backs 1, no. 9 (July 31, 1970): 7.
152
“N.O.W. Boston – President’s Report,” February 1970, folder 14, box 1, Boston N.O.W. Records, Schlesinger
Library, Harvard University; Women’s Liberation Newsletter 1, no. 4 (Nov. 18, 1969) in folder 38°, box 2, Annie
Popkin Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University; Women’s Liberation Newsletter (May 1970) folder 38°,
box 2, Annie Popkin Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University. Letter from Joan B. Mattuck to N.O.W.
members, August 12, 1970, folder 3, box 1, Boston N.O.W. Records, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University;
“Retrospective,” folder 3, box 1, Boston N.O.W. Records, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
153
The New England Women’s Coalition included a large number of groups, both those conventionally labeled
“liberal” and “radical” within the historiography of second wave feminism. Coalition members included: Black and
Third World Women’s Alliance; Boston College Women’s Caucus; Boston Women United; Clark University
Women’s Liberation; Daughters of Bilitis; Female Liberation; Feminist Repertory Theater of Cambridge; High
School Women’s Liberation; Lexington Women’s Liberation # 1; Loving Feminist Theater Group; Natick
Framingham Women’s Liberation; National Organization for Women; Northeastern University Female Liberation;
Northshore Feminists; Radcliffe Women to Keep Mind and Body Together; Simmons Women’s Liberation;
Socialist Workers Party; University of Massachusetts Women’s Liberation; Women’s Liberation Union of Rhode
151
39
Coalition crafted the referendum language to address the needs of women workers: “To be of
any use to mothers with night-shift jobs or evening classes and other activities or emergencies,
there must be child-care centers open 24 hours a day. If they are really to really solve the
problem they must be free and open to all children.”154 A mass meeting attended by over 200
women at Boston University on Feb. 6, 1971 catalyzed the effort, which the New England
Congress to Unite Women then endorsed at a March 26-28 conference attended by 800
women.155 Despite what appeared to be escalating momentum, however, the Coalition dropped
the initiative to obtain a childcare referendum.156 It is unclear what prompted the Coalition’s
decision, but Eastern Massachusetts NOW’s break with the Coalition may have played a
significant role.157
In addition to the inefficiency of the effort required to mobilize repeatedly in cities and
states across the country, local childcare activism bore unique limitations. Because state and city
governments had less money to devote to childcare than did the federal government, local groups
could do little more than redirect or slightly increase social service funding.158 Pursuing even the
most modest ambitions, local groups often did not have the strength to overcome conservative
Island: Kingston Chapter; Providence Chapter; Women and Imperialism; Women of Brown United; Women
Towards Awareness; Young Socialist Alliance; Young Women Committed to Action; Youth Against War and
Fascism Women; Vermont Liberty Union.
“New England Congress to Unite Women, March 26-28, 1971; What is the New England Women’s Coalition?” 1-2,
in “New England Women’s Coalition” file, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
154
Pamphlet, “Help Win Free 24 Hour Child-Care in Cambridge,” in “New England Women’s Coalition” file,
Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
155
Letter from Hanna Takashige and Chris Hildebrand, N.E.W.C.O. Coordinators, to members of the New England
Women’s Coalition, May 24, 1971, in “New England Women’s Coalition” file, Schlesinger Library, Harvard
University.
156
Freeman, Politics of Women’s Liberation, 242.
157
With 500 members in the Boston area, N.O.W. was the largest and the only national organization of the twentynine groups that belonged to the Coalition. “N.O.W. Quits the N.E. Lib Coalition,” Boston Evening Globe, 13 April
1971, 37, folder 231, box 6, Boston N.O.W. Records, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
158
“Socialist Feminism—A Strategy for the Women’s Movement,” 16.
40
allegations. In Berkeley, California, a private day nursery operator helped to prevent the city
council’s hire of a daycare Program Developer by calling the plan “creeping socialism.”159
Eastern Massachusetts NOW’s split from the New England Women’s Coalition
illustrated the susceptibility of local coalitions to internal policing and fragmentation. Not a deep
ideological divide but rather NOW’s fear of being associated with more radical elements of the
women’s movement precipitated the break. Chapter President Roberta Benjamin admitted to the
Boston Evening Globe “‘And after all N.O.W. is reformist. There’s a distinct difference in the
style of our membership. We’re not rally, demonstration oriented. N.O.W. is in fact itself a
coalition… It’s obvious that if we’re attempting to reach a wide variety of women, we have to
play it safe.’”160 Following its departure from the Coalition, the Boston NOW chapter fell into a
class-stratified framework for childcare policy. The chapter pursued government-funding for
centers serving public assistance recipients, orchestrating a lobbying day in April 1972 to
pressure Massachusetts, to exploit existing federal funding sources, namely Title IVA.161 The
The organization focused the majority of its energies, however, on gaining childcare tax
deductions benefiting middle-class parents.162 A tax deduction, however, did little to increase
the availability of childcare and did not benefit poor women who did not pay taxes.
C. The Comprehensive Child Development Act of 1971
The pragmatic importance of finding a single, rich funding source as well as the
conviction that all parents and children had a right to childcare, ultimately led activists to target
159
“Child Care Proposals Stagnate,” Freedom News 4, no. 11 (November 1970): 11.
Ibid.
161
Patricia S. Caplan, press release, “Children will lobby for child care,” folder 219, box 6, Boston N.O.W. Records,
Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
162
Letter from the National Organization of Women Eastern Massachusetts Chapter, Julia Wan Vice-President,
Susan L. Kannenberg, Program Chairwoman, “Dear Friend,” January 16, 1972, folder 197, box 6, Boston N.O.W.
Records, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University. When the governor signed a tax deduction into law that would
benefit over 220,000 families in fiscal year 1975, a State Representative complimented the chapter for its
“invaluable” lobbying work over the past two years. Letter from Lois G. Pines, State Representative to Terry Stone,
N.O.W., folder 468, box 13, Boston N.O.W. Records, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
160
41
the federal government, a turn requiring effective national players as well as local
mobilization.163 N.O.W. and feminist politicians within the Democratic Party lobbied Congress
while maintaining a close connection with grassroots feminists. By late 1970, Representative
Bella Abzug had begun to hold local hearings exploring new solutions to the childcare problem.
Abzug focused her acerbic wit on misguided U.S. government spending: “and here at home we
need 24-hour day-care centers and we don’t have them because they cost too much money and
we need the money for the generals… Someday, the 19th Congressional District will be recorded
as a victim of the war in Vietnam, just like Hue and Danang.”164 Women’s groups on the West
Coast also organized events to promote national legislation. In early 1971, the Los Angeles
Women’s Legislative Action held a childcare conference attended by 400 people and planned a
follow-up hearing with Congressional Representatives from Watts and the Mexican-American
community.165 These efforts began to connect grassroots activism with Congressional lobbying
and politics.
Local organizing had taught feminists, however, that success at any level of government
required support from non-feminist politicians and constituencies. Accordingly, national
organizing incorporated the spectrum of pro-childcare interests including social scientists, labor,
civil rights advocates, and politicians interested in improving the school performance of poor
children and in reducing welfare rolls. In a series of hearings throughout 1969 and 1970 and at
the 1970 White House Conference on Children, Senator Walter Mondale (D-Minnesota) and
Representative John Brademas (D-Indiana) drummed up support for childcare legislation, laying
ACDC, for example, “immediately eliminated the federal level since it is too remote to attack without a national
organization to force some change.” “Socialist Feminism—A Strategy for the Women’s Movement,” 16.
164
Jimmy Breslin, “Is Washington Ready for Bella Abzug? Is Anybody?” quoting from a talk Abzug delivered to
the New York Democratic Assembly Reform Club, folder 1, box 185, Gloria Steinem Papers, Sophia Smith
Collection, Smith College.
165
Letter from Betty Willett to Bella Abzug, February 14, 1971, folder: Child Care Correspondence 1970-1971, box
138, Bella Abzug Papers, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University.
163
42
the groundwork for their introduction of the Comprehensive Child Development Act.166 Despite
the structural bias of Congressional politics toward compromise, progress on the national level
carried the hope of concrete material and social advancement for women.
Debate over the CCDA centered on two points, both of which demonstrated the
vulnerability of feminist principles in childcare politics. First, the definition of income criteria
would determine the extent to which the Act embodied or rejected feminists’ claim to childcare
as a right obliging the state to provide universal, free services. The higher this income cutoff the
nearer the bill would come to the feminist agenda for universal childcare. The more narrow the
slice of families provided free services, the closer the bill’s reflection of some politicians and
child development scholars’ interest in childcare for poor families only. The House and Senate
ultimately passed a version of the Mondale and Brademas proposals, offering free services to all
families with an annual income below $4,320, which covered 3.6 million; families not so eligible
would pay on a sliding scale basis.167 Though counterintuitive, the prioritization of class actually
served as a conservative constraint on the progressive claim to childcare as a universal right.
Second, argument over the size of units able to act as “prime sponsors” of centers—the
units of local, state and tribal governments or public and private non-profits authorized to
coordinate services within a region, oversee quality, and channel monies to child development
centers—pitted activists’ faith in collaboration between the national government and local
entities against a federalist approach that consolidated social services at the state level.
Conservative politicians supported sponsorship units of 500,000, which would generally place
control at the state level, while progressives argued for units of 10,000. Feminists advocated the
smaller unit size in order to retain power over an institution that would shape their roles as
166
167
Michel, Children’s Interests / Mothers’ Rights, 248.
Hunter, “Day Care Service for All is Voted.”
43
mothers and workers and guide their children’s development and values. Civil rights activists
prominent in the childcare coalition—for example, Marian Wright Edelman—remembered
setting up Head Start programs in Mississippi in the face of racist, obstructionist school boards
and aimed to keep control of centers as close as possible to the parents.168 The bill that Nixon
vetoed set the minimum prime sponsorship unit size at 5,000 persons.169 According to historian
Sonya Michel, this gave President Nixon an excuse to veto the Act on administrability grounds.
The debate also caused fissures in the childcare coalition between members interested in using
childcare to induce broader social change, and thus insistent on local control realized via small
prime-sponsor units, and members more interested in child development and thus relatively
indifferent to community autonomy.170
Representatives Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug had forwarded an alternative bill to
the Mondale-Brademas bill, of which a fused version ultimately passed Congress. In hearings
before Congress Abzug made clear their women’s rights focus:
Everyone says that this is a children’s bill. So it is, for one very important goal of the
program is to help every American child… reach his full social and educational potential.
This bill, however, is also a woman’s bill and that is something no one seems to want to
mention. Indeed, I find it highly ironic that a bill which talks so much of the potential of
growing children fails even to mention the undeveloped potential of over half our adult
population.171
To that end, Chisholm and Abzug expanded the statement of purpose to recognize the harms to
women created by the dearth of childcare.172 In comparison to the Mondale-Brademas bill,
which authorized $2.1 billion for fiscal year 1973 and did not contain a specific price-tag
thereafter, the Chisholm-Abzug bill proposed an astounding $5, $8, and $10 billion for fiscal
Michel, Children’s Interests, 249.
Economic Opportunity Amendments of 1971, 18. Sonya Michel incorrectly reports the final prime sponsorship
unit size as 10,000.
170
Michel, Children’s Interests / Mothers’ Rights, 250-51.
171
House Hearings, 64.
172
Ibid., 64.
168
169
44
years 1973, 1974, and 1975, respectively.173 The Chisholm-Abzug bill encompassed feminist
objectives by providing for twenty-four hour childcare and prohibiting sex discrimination in the
staffing and administration of centers.174 Chisholm and Abzug entered the debate about the size
of prime sponsorship size at the most liberal end of the spectrum, taking the position that local
government units of any size should qualify.175 The Chishom-Abzug bill extended provisions of
the Mondale and Brademas bills allowing non-profit organizations to bypass local governments
that did not adequately meet the needs of economically disadvantaged children and to apply
directly to the Secretary of State for funding to include cases where local government failed to
meet the needs of preschool age children generally, or the needs of the children of single mothers
and working parents. In this manner, they aimed to make the bill “slightly less poverty and more
woman-oriented, more universal in application. Under our language conceivably a local N.O.W.
chapter or local women’s group might qualify as a secretary-designated sponsor.”176
Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug viewed comprehensive childcare from a feminist
vantage-point and strove to realize a bill that would both alleviate poverty and improve the lives
of women across classes. The definition of economic disadvantage proved central to controversy
“Comparison of BSA and Brademas Child Care Bills,” 3, folder: Child Care Abzug – Legislation, box 140, Bella
Abzug Papers, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University; Congress, House of Representatives, Select
Subcommittee on Education, Committee on Education and Labor, Hearings on H.R. 6748 and Related Bills, 92nd
Cong., 1st sess., 17 and 21 May and 3 June 1971 [hereinafter House Hearings].
House Hearings, 63, 73. Abzug testified: “To provide comprehensive educational and health services for every
child under 5 would cost us almost $28 billion annually. Such figures seem ‘unrealistic’ to us only because we have
learned to give human needs low budgestary priority. We spend upwards of $70 billion a year on weapons and
defense, and no one bats an eye.” Ibid., 63.
174
“High Points of the Chisholm-Abzug Child Care Bill,” 3, folder: Child Care Abzug – Legislation, box 140, Bella
Abzug Papers, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University; House Hearings, 65, 66. In referring to the
prohibition on sex-discrimination, Abzug testified: “By this I mean that women must be hired equally with men to
administer the program, but I mean more than that. I mean that little girls must be educated equally with little boys
in the projects themselves. This is one place we don’t want girls told they can be nurses but boys can be doctors.
That’s where sexism begins, gentlemen and ladies, and that’s where we’ve got to stop it first.”
175
“High Points of the Chisholm-Abzug Child Care Bill,” 1; House Hearings, 63, 74. Abzug expressed concern for
the ability of small towns to develop childcare programs, and Chisholm reminded her pro-childcare colleagues that
rural and suburban representatives might not support a bill with large sponsorship unit sizes, because it could be
seen as an initiative benefiting only cities.
176
“High Points of the Chisholm-Abzug Child Care Bill,” 3.
173
45
over the CCDA’s breadth largely because the allocation of funds depended on the ratio of
economically disadvantaged children in the prime sponsorship area. The Chisholm-Abzug bill,
sought to minimize the extent to which class would determine participation in the childcare
program by defining economic disadvantage at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) lower living
standard, $6,900 for an urban family of four, rather than at the poverty level. about $3,000. Like
the Mondale-Brademas bill, the Chisholm-Abzug bill would provide free services below this
income cutoff and services according to a sliding fee-scale above it.177 In addition, Chisholm
and Abzug wanted to make sure that each year, more women would be brought under the bill’s
coverage. To this end, their bill uniquely favored reserving 65% of funds for economically
disadvantaged children in the first year, but then reducing that allotment to 60% in the second
and 55% in the third year.178 Abzug’s legislative assistant wrote in a memo to her:
Something like 34% of all white women and 63% of all black women have family
incomes below the BLS level. However, this still seems to me to leave a hell of a lot of
women who won’t be covered under the 65% reserve. I think we owe it to women to
create at least some mechanism that can be used as a lever for making day care universal
once the desperate needs of low-income women are met.179
Of course, the CCDA’s economic inclusiveness served not only feminist interests but also
reduced “the danger of creating another educational ghetto for the underprivileged.” A New
York Times editorial entitled “A New Deal for Children,” written before conservative opposition
had reduced the free-services income cutoff from $6,960 to $4,320, opined: “Giving all mothers,
including those with educational sophistication and political influence, a stake in truly
imaginative child development centers is a way of creating an instant support force to fight for
high quality and expert staffing.”180 The passage of an ultimately diluted Mondale-Brademas
177
Ibid., 2.
House Hearings, 65, 75.
179
“High Points of the Chisholm-Abzug Child Care Bill,” 4.
180
“A New Deal for Children,” New York Times, 18 July 1971, E12.
178
46
over the Chisholm-Abzug bill illustrates how the breadth of the childcare coalition both enabled
the issue’s ascendance in national politics and compromised feminist principles to achieve what
many viewed as half-measures only.
V. PRESERVING FAMILY AND STATE: THE CCDA’S DEFEAT AND A FORGOTTEN FEMINISM
While feminists argued that their citizenship rights entitled them to universal childcare,
there existed broad cultural anxiety about the consequences of women’s liberation and
government intervention for family life. Equal employment opportunity and prohibitions on
state-sponsored discrimination did not threaten the family to the extent that childcare did.
Nothing else came so close to changing women’s roles as mothers. Even members of the
feminist movement confessed: “our system of privatised, individualized child-rearing… is
probably one of the scariest issues of women’s oppression, being so complex and tied to deeply
rooted emotional issues, with change so difficult to bring about.”181 Opposition to governmentfunded childcare came not only from extreme rightwing men and women, but from wives and
mothers across the United States who had difficulty abandoning traditional gender roles for an
uncertain promise of equality. Mrs. T. Dani Adams wrote to Betty Friedan: “I must admit this
demand [for free child care centers] really scares me… No institution, with its necessity for
sterility and efficiency, is and will be able, to create the same emotional climate for the infant
and child, as the mother can and does.”182
Women’s liberation both threatened and offered hope to women who in large based their
social identities on their roles as mothers and who equivocated about their relationship to the
movement. Lucille de Santo of Nassau County, New York, wrote to Betty Friedan about her
“CARASA and Child Care Politics & Program, Draft Proposal,” in “CARASA” file, Schlesinger Library,
Harvard University.
182
Letter from Mrs. T. Dani Adams to Betty Friedan, n.d., folder 1187, box 35, Betty Friedan Papers, Schlesinger
Library, Harvard University.
181
47
personal turmoil: “I am one of those women who is caught in between agreeing with what you
say and the memory of mother admonishing that ‘a woman’s place is in the home!’… I just
wonder what will become of the home if mother is out looking for her place in society?” At the
end of her letter, de Santo asked Friedan for reference to women’s liberation chapters in her
hometown. She closed: “I would very much like to delve into the subject further and perhaps
become one of the liberated ones! I am only 43 (only!) and lately find myself thinking that
surely there is more to life than this!” 183 Mary Iyer, who felt she had “missed the boat before
Women’s Liberation became ‘real,’” viewed Friedan’s message as inspirational. She wrote to
her about having to care for her two young kids, while her husband pursued his medical
residency, and of her own aspirations to go to college. “You helped me to see that ‘something
else’ can be realized for the future.”184 The fight for universal childcare came at a precipitous
moment, in which women looked both to the past and to the future for guidance.
Significantly, Congressmen and pundits opposing the CCDA did not expressly
denigrate working mothers or the provision of childcare to alleviate their burdens. Detractors
revealed their own gender and class biases when they concluded that if the CCDA were “really a
bill to help working mothers… the children of all income groups would not be involved.”185 At
other times, legislative opponents held up their own votes to minimize the Act’s universality as
evidence of its duplicity, stating that the lack of free services above the income cutoff “makes a
mockery of the propaganda that the bill is intended to help or encourage mothers to work. On
the contrary, it would discourage employment and discriminate against the working mother
183
Letter from Lucille De Santo to Betty Friedan, May 25, 1971, folder 1106, box 33, Betty Friedan Papers,
Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
184
Letter from Mary Iyer to Betty Friedan, May 24, 1971, folder 1106, box 33, Betty Friedan Papers, Schlesinger
Library, Harvard University.
185
“Nixon Must Veto,” Human Events.
48
making over $4,320.”186 Adversaries’ contorted logic showed both the extent to which the
success of the feminist movement prohibited a direct attack on women’s presence in the
workplace and the peril some saw in the extension of childcare to middle-class women.
The CCDA’s ultimate defeat brought the feminist battle for universal childcare to a
devastating conclusion. The CCDA’s adversaries deplored the feminist and socialist dimensions
of the bill, even though competing interests in the childcare coalition had diluted the
representation of these principles. Congressional opponents cited columnist James K.
Kilpatrick’s denunciation: “It is the boldest and most far-reaching scheme ever advanced for the
Sovietization of American youth… it is monstrous to concoct any such plan for a society that
still cherishes the values (however they may be abused) of home, family, church, and parental
control.”187 The Republican Party’s rightwing, growing suspicious of Nixon’s liberal
sympathies, warned: “if Richard Nixon signs [the CCDA], he will have forfeited his last frail
claim on Middle America’s support.”188 Fearing that his opponents within the party would put
forth a challenge candidate for the 1972 election, Nixon took seriously the advice of White
House Special Counsel Charles Colson, Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, and speechwriter Patrick
Buchanan regarding the importance of opposing government-funded childcare on principle.
Nixon’s virulent veto message drew significantly on a draft written by Buchanan.189
The CCDA had hit a rising wave of conservatism pushing back against the civil rights
and feminist movements’ federalization of social relations conservatives wanted to keep private.
Congressman Tom Pelly (R-Washington) warned his constituents that the CCDA “means that
one child out of every three will be subjected to a federally-designed, and, therefore, federally
Rarick, “Programs Federalize U.S. Children.”
H.R. Rep. No 92-1570, 45.
188
Ibid.
189
Berry, Politics of Parenthood, 138.
186
187
49
controlled program.”190 The conservative magazine Human Events chose more vitriolic
language, admonishing its readers to punish legislators who “believe in and work for the
socialized state” and who voted for a “bald attempt to supersede the state laws with federal
controls.” The magazine interpreted the CCDA as an extension of “federal social legislation”
that flouted the nation’s “constitutional decentralization of authority.” Nearly two months after
the bill’s passage, one article carried an unequivocal message for the country’s president:
“President Nixon will veto the measure if he has any regard for constitutional government and
for the rights of parents.”191 And, indeed, Nixon listened well to his conservative constituency,
stating in his veto that “[T]he Federal Government’s role wherever possible should be one of
assisting parents to purchase needed day care services in the private, open market, with Federal
involvement in direct provision of such services kept to an absolute minimum.”192
The CCDA’s breadth, which feminists and child development scholars viewed as a
strength, loomed ominously before its critics. Congressman Pelly stressed that what “sounds like
a desirable plan” would “cover the children of 32% of all American families, not just those in the
low-income level.”193 Human Events exposed the “sweeping nature” of the CCDA, explaining
to its readership that the bill would “widen the child care planned for the poor to all of the
nation’s children.” If daycare evolved into more than a necessary service for the low-income
families in which financial need compelled mothers to work, then it would pose a greater
normative threat to the nuclear family. Opponents derided especially the CCDA’s attractiveness
for “middle-income couples that would like to farm out their children while they pursue
Letter by Congressman Tom Pelly, “Our Freedoms Threatened by Child Care Program,” October 13, 1971,
National Defense Committee, National Society Daughters of the American Revolution, Washington, D.C.; available
from www.newswithviews.com/conspiracy/conspiracy1.htm; Internet; accessed 26 January 2004.
191
Thomas A. Lane, “Stringent Federal Controls; More Reasons Why Nixon Should Reject Child Care Bill,”
Human Events, 31:48 (November 20, 1971): 11.
192
Nixon, “Veto,” 1176-77.
193
Pelly, “Freedoms Threatened.”
190
50
individual careers.”194 Even though feminist language had remained peripheral to the CCDA’s
cautious legislative record, the Act’s opponents understood its relation to the feminist goal of
transforming the family and equalizing the sexes through universal childcare.
Anti-federalization and familial rhetoric came together in adversaries’ most hyperbolic
criticism that the CCDA would “destroy… the institution of the family” by putting “government
in place of the parent.”195 Congressman John R. Rarick (D-Louisiana), wrote that the CCDA
“instructed the Federal Government to establish programs to take children away from their
parents, place them in custody of the State and rear them according to State-ordained programs
and activities.” He portrayed the Act as authorizing the U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and
Welfare to develop twenty-hour social programming for children, with minimal time for parentchild interaction. “This power grab over our youth is reminiscent of the Nazi youth movement; in
fact, it goes far beyond Hitler’s wildest dreams or the most outlandish of the Communist
plans.”196 Behind the pro-CCDA lobby, according to Congressman Pelly, lay psychologists and
sociologists desire for “a giant laboratory to tinker with children’s minds.”197 Although
conservative Senator Bill Buckley had worked in an amendment making explicit the programs’
voluntary character, opponents expressed the belief that childcare advocates intended the CCDA
as a step toward mandatory participation. Originally non-compulsory public education and
recent Congressional efforts to mandate school busing provided an expedient political
analogy.198
Paul Scott, “Radical Child Care Legislation Moves Through Congress,” Human Events 31:28 (July 10, 1971): 13.
“Nixon Must Veto,” Human Events. Letter by Congressman John G. Schmitz (R-California), “Federal Child
Control Act Passed,” October 13, 1971, National Defense Committee, National Society Daughters of the American
Revolution, Washington, D.C.; available from www.newswithviews.com/conspiracy/conspiracy1.htm; Internet;
accessed 26 January 2004.
196
Letter by Congressman John R. Rarick (D-Louisiana) “Comprehensive Child Development Programs Federalize
U.S. Children,” October 5, 1971,
197
Pelly, “Freedoms Threatened.”
198
“Nixon Must Veto,” Human Events; Rarick “Programs Federalize U.S. Children;” Schmitz, “Act Passed.”
194
195
51
Nixon’s veto cited the CCDA’s unworkability and high costs, but objected most
strenuously to the bill’s alleged disruption of the nuclear family and, hence, the democratic
vitality of the American state. “[F]or the Federal Government to plunge headlong financially
into supporting child development would commit the vast moral authority of the National
Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the familycentered approach.”199 To deflect liberal criticism that a Christmastime veto evinced an attitude
toward the poor reminiscent of Ebenezer Scrooge,200 Nixon took recourse in a familial rhetoric
he knew held wide appeal. “[G]ood public policy requires that we enhance rather than diminish
both parental authority and parental involvement with children—particularly in those decisive
early years when social attitudes and a conscience are formed, and religious and moral
principles are first inculcated.”201 The CCDA threatened not merely equality between the sexes
but the perceived implications that such social change held in the midst of the Cold War.
According to Congressman Rarick, “Child development proposals should remind us of
Communist teachings on destruction of the family unit. Leon Trotsky, writing in ‘The
Revolution Betrayed,’ 1936, commented, that ‘you cannot abolish the family, you have to
replace it.’”202 If in Nixon’s words, the nuclear family formed the “keystone of our
civilization,”203 then a feminist effort to transform the family’s structure posed the deepest
danger for the American state.
Although by 1972 both the Democratic and Republican Party platforms included
comprehensive daycare, following the CCDA’s defeat, no universal childcare legislation ever
Nixon, “Veto,” 1177-78.
“Spirit of Christmas Present,” Commonweal 95 (December 24, 1971): 291.
201
Nixon, “Veto,” 1178.
202
Rarick, “Programs Federalize U.S. Children.”
203
Nixon, “Veto,” 1176.
199
200
52
gained widespread support in Congress.204 Subsequent years reinforced the trend toward a class
and race-stratified childcare policy. Nixon’s veto replaced the concept of universality with a
recognition of only poor women’s need for government-funded childcare. “I do not for a
moment overlook the fact that there are some needs to be served… One of these needs is for day
care, to enable mothers, particularly those at the lowest income levels, to take full-time jobs.”
Instead of the CCDA, Nixon supported the Family Assistance Plan (FAP), a welfare reform
proposal that would have limited childcare to women receiving public assistance and the extreme
working poor. Although considerably less progressive than the CCDA, FAP failed in Congress
because conservatives opposed the provision of benefits to women above the poverty level as
well as the authorization of monies for work-training.205 In 1974, Title XX of the Social Security
Act provided for childcare for workfare and “at-risk” populations, and the 1976 Aid to Day Care
Centers Act increased funding for public daycare centers.206
The defeat of the Comprehensive Child Development Act brought the feminist struggle
for universal childcare to a devastating conclusion. Nixon’s veto marked a turning point in the
bifurcation of childcare policy between private, marketplace provision for the working and
middle classes and public, subsidized childcare for the poor. Having come tantalizingly close to
definition as a right, daycare ultimately emerged as a commodity. Women had fought to prove
that ‘liberal’ equality in the public sphere depended on a ‘radical’ transformation of the private
sphere and that government had an appropriate and necessary role in realizing these intertwined
aims. Their loss demonstrated feminism’s limits in overcoming powerful political rhetoric
dividing the public from the private sphere. By constraining the ideological framework for
204
H.R. Rep. No 92-1570, 2.
Berry, Politics of Parenthood, 136; Nixon, “Veto,” 1176; Michel, Children’s Interests / Mothers’ Rights, 249.
206
Michel, Children’s Interests / Mothers’ Rights, 251-52.
205
53
political activism, the defeat of the campaign for universal childcare also rigidified a dichotomy
between liberal and radical feminism, ending a period of fertile collaboration.
54